Consensus with guaranteed convergence rate of high-order integrator agents in the presence of time-varying delays

This paper aims to study the consensus problem in directed networks of agents with high-order integrator dynamics and fixed topology. It is considered the existence of non-uniform time-varying delays in the agents control laws for each interaction between agents and their neighbours. Based on Lyapunov–Krasovskii stability theory and algebraic graph theory, sufficient conditions, in terms of linear matrix inequalities, are given to verify if consensus is achieved with guaranteed exponential convergence rate. The efficiency of the proposed method is verified by numerical simulations. The simulations reveal that the conditions established in this work outperformed the similar existing ones in all numerical tests accomplished in this paper.