In this study, a novel distributed adaptive controller is provided for consensus control of high‐order non‐linear multi‐agent systems with unknown time‐varying delays. The system is subject to uncertain disturbances, and the agents' dynamics are not known. Unlike the existing literature, the proposed method does not require time‐delay terms in system dynamics to be bounded. A neural network is used to model the unknown non‐linear dynamics. Then, despite the destabilising effect of the unknown delays, some adaptive rules based on the dynamic surface control are designed to achieve the consensus objective. The semi‐global uniform boundedness of the resultant closed‐loop signals and the convergence of the tracking errors to a neighbourhood of the origin are shown mathematically. Simulations verify the effectiveness of the results.
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