Asynchronous distributed algorithms for heading consensus of multi-agent systems with communication delay

In this paper, we propose two asynchronous distributed protocols for the heading consensus of a multi-agent group which cannot access a global coordinate system and a global time. Both the leaderless and leader-following cases are addressed, and inter-agent communication delay is taken into account. It is proved, under some standard connectivity assumptions, that our leaderless algorithm ensures the heading consensus provided the initial headings are not balanced; and the leader-based algorithm guarantees the global heading consensus.