  This paper addresses the distributed consensus protocol design problem for
multi-agent systems with general linear dynamics and directed communication
graphs. Existing works usually design consensus protocols using the smallest
real part of the nonzero eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix associated with
the communication graph, which however is global information. In this paper,
based on only the agent dynamics and the relative states of neighboring agents,
a distributed adaptive consensus protocol is designed to achieve
leader-follower consensus for any communication graph containing a directed
spanning tree with the leader as the root node. The proposed adaptive protocol
is independent of any global information of the communication graph and thereby
is fully distributed. Extensions to the case with multiple leaders are further
studied.
