A Distributed Adaptive State Feedback Control Scheme For Output Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems

This paper studies an open leader-following output consensus problem of multi-agent systems described by general uncertain linear systems. The control objective is to make the outputs of the follower agents with parametric uncertainties track a desired trajectory given by a virtual leader. For such general agent systems, a new distributed adaptive state feedback control framework is developed for multi-agent output consensus, without restrictive follower-leader matching conditions. This paper solves the state feedback output consensus problem for uncertain multi-agent systems with relative degree one. The adaptive control design has a desirable structure, simple as it is useful for many control applications, and essential as it is extensible to the higher relative degree case and/or the output feedback control case. Such a new distributed adaptive consensus scheme is designed based on model reference adaptive control which is capable of achieving desired tracking and effectively dealing with system parameter uncertainties. It guarantees the desired leader-following output consensus and closed-loop signal boundedness. A simulation study on a multiple-aircraft system verifies the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive multi-agent output consensus scheme.