Adaptive stationary consensus protocol for a class of high‐order nonlinear multiagent systems with jointly connected topologies

Summary The leaderless consensus problem in a class of dynamic agents with high‐order input‐affine nonlinear models is studied. Based on communication of position information among the agents, an adaptive protocol is proposed that guarantees achieving consensus in the network in the presence of unknown parameters in the agents models. The network topology is considered undirected, which may not be connected constantly. Hence, by invoking the Cauchy convergence criterion, sufficient conditions to achieve consensus in the presence of jointly connected switching topologies are obtained. A numerical example for a team of single‐link flexible joint manipulators with forth‐order nonlinear models is provided to confirm the accuracy of the proposed consensus protocol. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.