Distributed Adaptive Tracking Control for Fuzzy Nonlinear MASs Under Round-Robin Protocol

In this article, the cooperative fuzzy tracking control problem for a type of high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems under the Round-Robin (RR) communication protocol is solved. To effectively reduce the communication among agents, an RR communication protocol is first proposed, where each agent can communicate with only one neighbor at any given time. Based on the developed communication protocol, a hierarchical control approach is introduced, consisting of a distributed observer layer that utilizes information from both local and neighboring agents, and a decentralized control layer that operates solely based on local agent information. Specifically, a distributed observer is designed in the distributed observer layer to achieve the distributed observation objective by introducing a time-varying gain in the observer input. Furthermore, an improved distributed observer with the upper triangular form is constructed to produce a signal with high-order derivatives. In the decentralized control layer, fuzzy adaptive controllers are designed for all agents by using the backstepping technique. By using the Lyapunov stability theory, rigorous stability analysis shows that the cooperative fuzzy tracking control problem is solved under the developed hierarchical control approach. In the end, a simulation example is presented to demonstrate the validity of our proposed method.