Distributed adaptive time-varying formation tracking for linear multi-agent systems: A dynamic output approach

In this paper, fully distributed time-varying formation tracking problem for general linear time-invariant (LTI) multi-agent systems is investigated by using an adaptive-based approach. The communication topology is a spanning tree in which a leader's output is available to only a subset of the agents (followers) among which the communication is undirected. The followers can form a time-varying formation that is specified by predefined time-varying vectors and at the same time track the leader's trajectory that is also time-varying. A new class of fully distributed observer-type protocol based on each follower's relative output measurements of neighboring agents is proposed, which does not need the absolute or relative state information that is required in some observer-type protocols. Compared with the existing works, one main contribution of this paper is that the proposed protocol is fully distributed which requires no global information of communication topology and is based on output measurements. Finally, a simulation is provided to verify the effectiveness of the theoretical results.