Leader-Following Output Formation Control of Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems

A leader-following output formation control problem of heterogeneous multi-agent systems is studied in this work. The system structure of the autonomous leader is different with that of the formation followers. Only the agents which have the leader agent as its neighbour can obtain the leader information. An output formation protocol is constructed to solve the output formation problem based on the output regulation theory. The leader information is necessary for the output formation protocol. Thus the leader information is reconstructed for each formation followers by a leader mission trajectory observer using only the distributed information from the information transmission networks. The output formation describes the scenario that the output trajectories of the formation followers form a special geometrical shape in according with the moving of output trajectories of the autonomous leader. A simulation example shows the effectiveness of the output formation results.