Distributed consensus tracking of multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics under a reference leader

This paper investigates the distributed consensus tracking problem for multi-agent systems with Lipschitz-type dynamics under a reference leader. It is assumed that the leader state information is only available to a subset of followers, while the bounded reference input of the leader’s is unavailable to any follower. To achieve consensus tracking, a class of discontinuous protocols based on the relative information between the neighbouring agents are proposed. Furthermore, as extensions of the former result, the robust and adaptive consensus tracking problems are studied for the case where there exist parameter uncertainties and external disturbances in the network. Finally, the effectiveness of the theoretical result is demonstrated through a network of single-link manipulators.