Distributed Output-Feedback Tracking Control for a Class of Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems With Polynomial Growth

This paper investigates the distributed output-feedback tracking problem for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) with polynomial growth in unmeasurable states. Essentially different from the case with linear growth, it drives us to develop a more powerful control policy to cope with the polynomially growing nonlinearities. To ensure that the error between the follower’s output and the leader’s output is arbitrarily small while all the states of the closed-loop system are globally bounded, a nominal system is considered first. For this, we establish a distributed state-feedback virtual controller firstly to obtain the controller structure for the considered control problem, and then, by the distributed high-gain homogeneous domination method, a homogeneous output-feedback controller is obtained. On the basis of the available tracking controller, we turn to the control problem itself and provide the performance analysis. To be emphasized, the proposed distributed state-feedback virtual controller enables us to achieve rather general results on global output-feedback stabilization of nonlinear multi-agent systems with polynomial growth. Finally, the effectiveness of the design scheme is illustrated by an example.