Consensus Control of Nonlinear Multiagent Systems with Incremental Quadratic Constraints and Time Delays

This paper considers the problem of consensus control for a class of nonlinear multiagent systems with incremental quadratic constraints and time delays. Each agent exchanges state information through a strongly connected communication topology. Based on the information obtained from neighboring agents, a distributed consensus protocol is designed. A delay-independent consensus condition is formed for the protocol to solve the consensus problem by employing Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional method. In order to deal with the nonlinear terms in matrix inequalities, an iterative algorithm is proposed by using the Schur complement lemma and the cone complementary linearization method. The nonlinearities under consideration are more general than many other nonlinearities considered in related literature studies since the incremental quadratic constraints include many other known nonlinearities as some special cases. Finally, we give a numerical example to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed consensus control protocol.