Consensus Control of Position-Constrained Multi-Agent Systems Without the Velocity Information of Neighbors

Currently, most consensus control approaches need each agent to access all its neighbors’ states directly. The distributed consensus issue of second-order multi-agent systems subject to position constraints is studied without such requirements. The only condition for the communication topology is to include a directed spanning tree. An innovative reference position is provided to deal with the position constraints while eliminating the need for neighbors’ velocity variables. An adaptive control method is designed by constructing a sliding-mode-esque variable so that each agent’s transformed position can converge towards the reference position. This new method can guarantee uniform boundedness of each closed-loop signal as well as asymptotic consensus, and the requirements to meet the position constraints are satisfied at all times. Numerical simulation verifies the correctness of the theoretical results.