Observer-Based Distributed Leader-Follower Tracking Control: A New Perspective and Results
For researchers in multi-agent systems, this work offers a novel observer-based framework that improves tracking control by leveraging input estimation, though it is an incremental extension of existing observer-based methods.
This paper proposes a new perspective on leader-follower tracking control by enabling followers to estimate the leader's driving input via distributed input observers, developing a framework that enhances tracking for first- and second-order multi-agent systems. The approach shows advantages over existing methods in convergence and performance, validated through simulations.
Leader-follower tracking control design has received significant attention in recent years due to its important and wide applications. Considering a multi-agent system composed of a leader and multiple followers, this paper proposes and investigates a new perspective into this problem: can we enable a follower to estimate the leader's driving input and leverage this idea to develop new observer-based tracking control approaches? With this motivation, we develop an input-observer-based leader-follower tracking control framework, which features distributed input observers that allow a follower to locally estimate the leader's input toward enhancing tracking control. This work first studies the first-order tracking problem. It then extends to the more sophisticated case of second-order tracking and considers a challenging situation when the leader's and followers' velocities are not measured. The proposed approaches exhibit interesting and useful advantages as revealed by a comparison with the literature. Convergence properties of the proposed approaches are rigorously analyzed. Simulation results further illustrate the efficacy of the proposed perspective, framework and approaches.