  This paper proposes a consensus controller for multi-agent systems that can
guarantee the agents' safety. The controller, built with the idea of output
prediction and the Newton-Raphson method, achieves consensus for a class of
heterogeneous nonlinear systems. The Integral Control Barrier Function is
applied in conjunction with the controller, such that the agents' states are
confined within pre-defined safety sets. Due to the dynamically-defined control
input, the resulting optimization problem from the barrier function is always a
Quadratic Program, despite the nonlinearities that the system dynamics may
have. We verify the proposed controller using a platoon of autonomous vehicles
modeled by kinematic bicycles. A convergence analysis of the leader-follower
consensus under the path graph topology is conducted. Simulation results show
that the vehicles achieve consensus while keeping safe inter-agent distances,
suggesting a potential in future applications.
