Consensus Problems in Networks of Agents under Nonlinear Protocols with Directed Interaction Topology

The purpose of this short paper is to provide a theoretical analysis for the consensus problem under nonlinear protocols. A main contribution of this work is to generalize the previous consensus problems under nonlinear protocols for networks with undirected graphs to directed graphs (information flow). Our theoretical result is that if the directed graph is strongly connected and the nonlinear protocol is strictly increasing, then consensus can be realized. Some simple examples are also provided to demonstrate the validity of our theoretical result.