Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Group Consensus of Agents With Third-Order Dynamics in Directed Networks

In this paper, we investigate the group consensus problem in directed networks where agents have third-order dynamics. Necessary and sufficient conditions on the controller parameters are obtained to ensure K-equilibria group consensus where K is determined by the structure of the directed graph. It is theoretically shown that, for an arbitrary directed graph, there exist controller parameters that satisfy the given conditions. A systematic method for choosing the controller parameters to guarantee group consensus is suggested and theoretical results are verified by numerical examples.