Connectivity-preserving design strategy for distributed cooperative tracking of uncertain nonaffine nonlinear time-delay multi-agent systems

Abstract

A distributed connectivity-preserving cooperative tracking problem is addressed for networked nonaffine nonlinear time-delay multi-agent systems with different communication ranges. State delays, nonaffine nonlinearities, and control directions of followers are assumed to be heterogenous and completely unknown. Unlike the literature on the cooperative control of time-delay multiagents, this paper contributes to establish a universal memoryless tracking strategy using nonlinear cooperative errors for preserving the initial connectivity among agents and simultaneously achieving cooperative tracking in the presence of unknown time-varying delays. A distributed approximation-based tracker for each follower is recursively constructed, and its stability is analyzed, without employing potential functions used for the connectivity preservation problem in the literature. Simulation examples are provided to validate the presented approach.