Distributed adaptive leader–follower and leaderless consensus control of a class of strict-feedback nonlinear systems : a unified approach

In this paper, distributed adaptive consensus for a class of strict-feedback nonlinear systems under directed topology condition is investigated. Both leader–follower and leaderless cases are considered in a unified framework. To design distributed controller for each subsystem, a local compensatory variable is generated based on the signals collected from its neighbors. Such a technique enables us to solve the leader–follower consensus and leaderless consensus problems in a unified framework. And it further allows us to treat the leaderless consensus as a special case of the leader–follower consensus. For leader–follower consensus, the assumption that the leader trajectory is linearly para…