Leader‐following consensus of a class of heterogeneous uncertain multi‐agent systems with a distributed model reference adaptive control law

Abstract

SummaryThis paper considers the leader‐following consensus problem of a multi‐agent system whose agents have heterogeneous uncertain dynamics in homogeneous state dimensions. Each agent utilizes a distributed model reference adaptive control (MRAC) law to deal with uncertainties. The nominal part of the MRAC is a distributed static state feedback control law. The reference model is the leader‐following consensus problem of reference agents with homogeneous linear time‐invariant dynamics. This problem becomes an N‐player graphical differential game under a given cost function. The reference agents utilize distributed static state feedback controllers that constitute a Nash equilibrium solution to the graphical differential game. This paper provides the conditions for the distributed MRAC to guarantee that each agent asymptotically tracks the corresponding reference agent; consequently, the multi‐agent system solves the leader‐following consensus problem as the reference model does. These conditions yield a straightforward design method for the MRAC. A numerical example demonstrates an application of the proposed approach to a multi‐robot system with nonlinear dynamics.