Leader-following rendezvous with connectivity preservation for multi-robot systems with an unknown leader

This paper studies the leader-following rendezvous problem with connectivity preservation for multi-agent systems composed of uncertain multi-robot systems subject to external disturbances and an unknown leader, both of which are generated by a so-called exosystem with parametric uncertainty. By combining internal model design, potential function technique and adaptive control, a distributed control strategy is proposed to maintain the connectivity of the communication network, to achieve the asymptotic tracking of all the followers to the output of the unknown leader system, as well as to reject unknown external disturbances.