Distributed Output Feedback Consensus of Uncertain Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems With Limited Data Rate

This paper considers the distributed output feedback consensus problem of uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems with limited data rate. Each agent is modeled by an nth order integrator with unmeasurable states and unknown nonlinear dynamics. An (n+2)th order extended state observer (ESO) is first designed to estimate the unmeasurable agent states and the unknown nonlinear dynamics. Based on the output of the ESO, a distributed consensus protocol based on dynamic encoding and decoding is proposed. It is shown that, for a connected undirected network with nth order uncertain nonlinear agents, consensus can be guaranteed with merely one bit information exchange between each pair of adjacent agents at each time step.