Cooperative Tracking for High-Order Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems via Adaptive Control

This paper studies the cooperative tracking problem for high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems under a directed communication topology. The state and the input of the leader are bounded. Distributed adaptive nonlinear protocols based on the relative states of neighboring agents are proposed, which can ensure the states of the followers converge to the state of the leader under the assumption that the directed graph contains a spanning tree with the root node being the leader agent. The distinctive features of this work are that we do not put any restrictions (such as globally Lipschitz or Lipschitz-like condition) on nonlinear functions and the adaptive protocols here can be implemented in a fully distributed fashion without using any global information (such as the knowledge of eigenvalue information of the Laplacian matrix associated with the whole communication topology). A simulation example is presented to illustrate the theoretical result.