Connectivity-Preserving Consensus Tracking of Uncertain Nonlinear Strict-Feedback Multiagent Systems: An Error Transformation Approach

This brief addresses a distributed connectivity-preserving adaptive consensus tracking problem of uncertain nonlinear strict-feedback multiagent systems with limited communication ranges. Compared with existing consensus results for uncertain nonlinear lower triangular multiagent systems, the main contribution of this brief is to present an error-transformation-based design methodology to preserve initial connectivity patterns in the consensus tracking field, namely, both connectivity preservation and consensus tracking problems are considered for uncertain nonlinear lower triangular multiagent systems. A dynamic surface design based on nonlinearly transformed errors and neural network function approximators is established to construct the local controller of each follower. In addition, a technical lemma is derived to analyze the stability of the proposed connectivity-preserving consensus scheme in the Lyapunov sense.