Leader-follower Consensus Tracking for Heterogeneous Nonlinear Cooperative Systems: A Decentralized Design Framework

This paper addresses the leader-follower consensus tracking problem for heterogeneous systems with general Lipschitz nonidentical nonlinear dynamics under a direct communication topology. Unlike existing works that achieved the cooperative behavior for heterogeneous dynamics networks with a nonzero error bound after the evolution of the entire systems, this paper develops an online leader-follower consensus tracking algorithm in which the design of the error condensation controller is proposed to achieve the completely cooperative behavior. In the sense of Lyapunov stability, it is proved that the leader-follower consensus tracking for the closed-loop heterogeneous systems with nonidentical nonlinear dynamics can be achieved completely. Two simulation examples are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.