Output Feedback Practical Coordinated Tracking of Uncertain Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems Under Switching Network Topology

Abstract

This note proposes a dynamic controller for practical coordinated tracking of uncertain heterogeneous multi-agent systems. The agents are high-order linear systems subject to external disturbances and plant uncertainties, the input to the leader is not known to other agents, and the network topology is time-varying. We adopt a recently developed reduced-order disturbance observer to present a distributed tracking controller which uses only relative measurements. It is shown that the proposed controller can be tuned to ensure the ultimate boundedness of tracking error which can be chosen arbitrarily small despite the network switching, plant uncertainties, and disturbances. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.