Distributed adaptive formation tracking for a class of networked nonlinear systems

This paper considers the formation problem of tracking a reference for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems in strict-feedback form under a directed graph. A portion of subsystems have no access to the information of reference. Distributed adaptive controllers are proposed by employing backstepping technique. It is proved that, with the proposed scheme, all the closed-loop signals are bounded and the formation tracking error can converge to zero. Simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.