Leader Following Consensus of Discrete-Time Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems: A Simulation Study

In this research, we study the leader following consensus problem for discrete-time multi-agent systems. The multi-agent systems we consider are composed of informed follower agents, uninformed follower agents and the virtual leader agent. A distributed consensus algorithm is proposed to realize our control objectives: position and velocity tracking of the virtual leader moving at constant speed. A comprehensive simulation study is presented to investigate system performance and to illustrate that the control algorithm achieves the desired objectives. In particular, under our proposed control algorithm, all informed follower agents will track the virtual leader. And, if an uninformed follower agent is connected to an informed follower agent from time to time, it will also be able to track the virtual leader. Numerical simulations demonstrate that even a small percentage of informed follower agents can drive a large portion of follower agents to track the virtual leader. It is also shown that the consensus rate increases as the percentage of informed follower agents increases, as the sensing radius increases, or as the total number of the follower agents increases.