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In this paper, distributed adaptive consensus for a class of strict-feedback nonlinear systems under directed topology condition is investigated. Both leader–follower and leaderless cases are considered in a unified framework. To design distributed controller for each subsystem, a local compensatory variable is generated based on the signals collected from its neighbors. Such a technique enables us to solve the leader–follower consensus and leaderless consensus problems in a unified framework. And it further allows us to treat the leaderless consensus as a special case of the leader–follower consensus. For leader–follower consensus, the assumption that the leader trajectory is linearly parameterized with some known functions as required in most recent relevant literatures is successfully relaxed. It is shown that global uniform boundedness of all closed-loop signals and asymptotically output consensus could be …