Robust Consensus for Networked Mechanical Systems with Coupling Time Delay

This paper studies the state consensus for a class of networked nonlinear mechanical systems with coupling time delay. In particular, robust consensus protocols for both deterministic and uncertain systems with time delay are investigated. For deterministic systems, we develop a P-like protocol which allows for variable coupling time delay. We show that it is sufficient to have only the relative position information together with a damping control term, whereas the relative velocity information is not needed for state consensus. Then, an adaptive robust control protocol is proposed for uncertain systems with unknown parameters in the system dynamics and arbitrary constant coupling time delays. By introducing the passivity-based framework, we demonstrate that state consensus is still reachable in this case. Finally, a numerical example is included to illustrate the obtained results.