Edinburgh Napier University

  This paper studies the leader-following consensus problem for high-order stochastic nonlinear multi-agent systems. Each agent is in the strict feedback form with nonlinear functions in drift and diffusion terms and admitting time-varying incremental rates. A novel distributed observer-type consensus protocol is proposed based only on the relative output measurements of neighboring agents. The dynamic gains in controller are designed to compensate for the time-varying coefficients of nonlinear functions. By using appropriate state transformation, it is proved that the 1th moment exponential leader-following consensus is guaranteed by the proposed protocol. Different from some existing approaches, the proposed method only requires the output information of neighboring agents to be shared and does not need the observers’ full state variables to be transmitted, thus the network bandwidth is saved. In addition, the controller is constructed without using the traditional backstepping method, which makes the design procedure simple and convenient for use. Finally, a simulation example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.