Abstract

This paper considers the leader-following consensus problem of multi-agent systems subject to unbounded distributed communication delays under an condition that only the neighboring agents of the leader have access to the information on both the system matrix and the state of the leader. A novel adaptive distributed observer is proposed to estimate both the system matrix and the state of the leader under unbounded distributed communication delays, without requiring that the information of the unbounded delays is known a priori . A key technical result is firstly established and a novel distributed controller is then developed based on the proposed distributed observer. It is shown that the resulting closed-loop system achieves the desired consensus. Finally, the effectiveness of the theoretical results is validated by two simulation examples.