Model-Independent Robust Consensus of Multiple Euler–Lagrange Systems

The robustness of multiple Euler–Lagrange systems (MELSs) measures the capability of maintaining coordination control performance when experiencing disturbance or faults. This article investigates a leader–follower robust consensus problem of MELSs, which experience time-varying input disturbance and uncertain communication link faults (CLFs). First of all, based on an adaptive control theory, we design fully distributed observers for estimating the dynamic and state of leader, which have robustness to CLFs. Then, an observer-based proportional–integral (PI) control protocol is designed to achieve consensus of MELSs with robustness to time-varying input disturbance. Different from the existing related results, this robust observer-based PI controller is fully distributed and model independent, which is irrelevant to any prior information (i.e., the structures and features) of agent dynamic or global network information. At last, the validity of the proposed theoretical results is confirmed by a simulation example.