Hierarchical Decomposition-Based Distributed Full States Tracking Consensus for High-Order Nonlinear Multiagent Systems

This article studies the distributed adaptive leader-following control for high-order time-varying nonlinear multiagent systems (MASs) with uncertain parameters. The state feedback protocol and output feedback protocol are proposed, respectively, to render all states consensus errors to converge to zero asymptotically. First, the hierarchical decomposition algorithm is used to construct a refreshed communication graph to address the mutual dependence problem of controllers. Then, by introducing a local neighborhood consensus errors-based transformation, the leader-following consensus problem is converted into the stabilization problem for the consensus error system. Using the backstepping method and tuning function technique, the distributed adaptive state feedback controller is designed to render all followers’ states to track the leader’s ones. Further, by constructing the reduced-order dynamic gain k-filter to estimate unmeasured states, a distributed adaptive output feedback controller is designed. In both controller design methods, the traditional Lipschitz condition need not be satisfied any more for all time-varying nonlinear functions, and different from most of the existing results on the high-order nonlinear MASs, full states consensus can be obtained. Finally, a general numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.