ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the distributed tracking problem for multi-agent systems with general continuous-time linear agent dynamics. The distributed tracking problem is a consensus problem for the special case where the communication graph contains a directed spanning tree and a root node. In many circumstances, nonzero control actions might be implemented on the leader in order to achieve certain objectives, for example, to reach a desirable consensus value or to avoid hazardous obstacles. However, it is restrictive and impractical to assume that all the followers know the leader’s control input, especially when the scale of the network is large. It is worthwhile mentioning that the design of the static controller requires the upper bound of the leader’s control input and the nonzero eigenvalue information of the communication graph, which actually are global information. In order to remove this limitation, a distributed discontinuous adaptive controller with time-varying coupling gains is further designed, which is fully distributed and also solves the distributed tracking problem.
