Consensus of multi-agent systems with both input amplitude and input rate constraints

Abstract In this paper, the consensus problem is considered for multi-agent systems with input constraint under directed graphs, including leaderless and leader-following cases. Different from existing related works, the distinct feature of this paper is that both the amplitude and rate of the agents’ input are ensured in the given ranges. For the leaderless case, the saturation control strategy is designed and employed for multi-agent systems consensus with the aid of a novel saturation function. For the leader-following case, the saturation-function-based distributed observer as well as the observer-based saturation controller are proposed to achieve consensus. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of the designed methods.