Robust Consensus of a Class of Perturbed Port-Hamiltonian Systems with Time Delays

In this article, we present a distributed control system design for the consensus of nonlinear multiagent systems subject to non-ideal communication channels and external disturbances. The agents are modeled as a class of perturbed port-Hamiltonian systems—a formalism to model complex physical and engineering systems—and the imperfection in the communication channels is represented by time-delays that are assumed to be bounded. We show that the proposed distributed controller ensures global asymptomatic convergence of the agents to a consensus equilibrium, despite external disturbances and time-delays. We also extend the results to Euler–Lagrange agents as a corollary of our main result. Simulation results, for a network of five, 2-degrees-of-freedom robotic manipulators show the performance of our proposed control design.