Distributed Average Tracking of Physical Second-Order Agents With Heterogeneous Unknown Nonlinear Dynamics Without Constraint on Input Signals

Abstract

This paper addresses distributed average tracking of physical second-order agents with heterogeneous unknown nonlinear dynamics, where there is no constraint on input signals and there is no need for correct initialization. The unknown nonlinear terms in agents’ dynamics are heterogeneous, satisfying a Lipschitz-like condition that will be defined later and is more general than the Lipschitz condition. In the proposed algorithm, a control input and a filter are designed for each agent. Each agent's filter has two outputs and the idea is that the first output estimates the average of the input signals, and the second output estimates the average of the input velocities asymptotically. In parallel, each agent's position and velocity are driven to track, respectively, the first and the second outputs. Having an unknown term in agents’ dynamics necessitates designing the filters for agents. Since the nonlinear terms in agents’ dynamics can be unbounded and the input signals are arbitrary, novel time-varying gains are employed in agents’ filters and control inputs to overcome these unboundedness effects. Finally, the results are improved to achieve the distributed average tracking for a group of double-integrator agents, where there is no constraint on input signals and the filter is not required anymore. Numerical simulations are also presented to illustrate the theoretical results.