Robust consensus tracking for a class of heterogeneous second-order nonlinear multi-agent systems

• Published in: International journal of robust and nonlinear control Vol. 25; no. 17; pp. 3367 - 3383
• Main Authors: Wang, Chuanrui, Ji, Haibo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bognor Regis Blackwell Publishing Ltd 25-11-2015; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc
• Subjects: Adaptive control; Agents (artificial intelligence); Expert systems; Mathematical analysis; Mathematical models; multi-agent systems; nonlinear systems; Nonlinearity; robust consensus tracking; Tracking; Tracking problem
• ISSN: 1049-8923; 1099-1239
• DOI: 10.1002/rnc.3269

Summary
This paper deals with the robust consensus tracking problem for a class of heterogeneous second‐order nonlinear multi‐agent systems with bounded external disturbances. First, a distributed adaptive control law is proposed based on the relative position and velocity information. It is shown that for any connected undirected communication graph, the proposed control law solves the robust consensus tracking problem. Then, by introducing a novel distributed observer and employing backstepping design techniques, a distributed adaptive control law is constructed based only on the relative position information. Compared with the existing results, the proposed adaptive consensus protocols are in a distributed fashion, and the nonlinear functions are not required to satisfy any globally Lipschitz or Lipschitz‐like condition. Numerical examples are given to verify our proposed protocols. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.