Leader-follower consensus of nonlinear agricultural multiagents using distributed adaptive protocols

Agricultural multi-agent systems are expected to be fundamental to future intelligent agriculture and digital farming. This study deals with agricultural multirobots from the perspective of the control algorithm, and adaptive leader-following consensus protocol design problems are resolved for nonlinear multiagent systems. A fully distributed edge-based strategy adaptive law is discussed herein; thus, the multiagent consensus can be implemented without knowing global information. Unlike methodologies in existing literature on nonlinear consensus, the proposed methodology is considerably less conservative because of the incremental quadratic constraint containing a wider variety of nonlinearities. This means that, utilizing an incremental multiplier matrix with appropriate values, the control scheme can be applied to a broader class of nonlinear multi-agent systems, which is applicable to more agricultural fields. Finally, a numerical example consisting of six followers and one leader is provided to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed protocol under a directed network.