Cooperative tracking for nonlinear multi-agent systems with hybrid time-delayed protocol

Abstract

This paper investigates cooperative tracking for nonlinear multi-agent systems, and mainly focuses on the consensus tracking subjected to one leader and containment tracking subjected to multiple leaders. Based on the outdate information stored in each agent׳s memory, a hybrid pinning protocol constructed by both current states and outdated states is proposed for consensus tracking system, which can also be viewed as a hybrid time-delayed protocol. A multi-step algorithm is then provided to construct the pinning protocol under which consensus tracking can be asymptotically solved. Furthermore, we extend the single target tracking on the network to the multi-target tracking case, i.e., containment tracking problem. Similar hybrid time-delayed protocol and multi-step algorithm can be constructed as well, which can guarantee the asymptotical containment of the nonlinear multi-agent system. It has been shown that the proposed hybrid time-delayed protocols are fairly robust to any constant time delays for the cooperative tracking problems of nonlinear multi-agent systems. Finally, some numerical examples are given to demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of the proposed schemes.