Adaptive consensus with limited information for uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems

This paper investigates the adaptive consensus with limited information for a class of uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs). The limited information, meaning the incomplete information transmitted between agents, stems from nonzero-kernel weight matrices of communication networks, which deserves concerns owing to its practical interest such as in privacy preserving and information compression. Apart from the limited/incomplete information, the paper considers nonlinear MASs with large uncertainties (without known upper bounds). This is essentially different from the existing results of linear systems and poses challenges for the design and analysis of adaptive consensus. As for fully distributed protocol design, dynamic high gains are introduced to compensate for the system uncertainties and for the unavailable global graph information. In closed-loop consensus analysis, a new Lyapunov function is constructed by utilising weight and incidence matrices instead of Laplacian matrix. It turns out that the designed protocol can guarantee the boundedness of closed-loop MASs signals and the convergent consensus. Two numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.