Coordinated tracking of multi-agent systems with a leader of bounded unknown input using distributed continuous controllers

This paper addresses the coordinated tracking control problem for multi-agent systems with general linear dynamics and a leader whose control input might be nonzero and not available to any follower. Based on the relative states of neighboring agents, two distributed continuous controllers with, respectively, static and adaptive coupling gains, are designed, under which the tracking error of each follower is uniformly ultimately bounded, if the communication graph among the followers is undirected, the leader has directed paths to all followers, and the leader's control input is bounded. A sufficient condition for the existence of the distributed controllers is that each agent is stabilizable. © 2012 IEEE.