A New Encounter Between Leader-Follower Tracking and Observer-Based Control: Towards Enhancing Robustness against Disturbances
It relaxes assumptions on disturbances in multi-agent tracking, enabling more realistic scenarios, but the results are incremental as they extend existing observer-based methods.
This paper addresses robust tracking control in leader-follower multi-agent systems where both leader and followers are affected by disturbances with bounded rates of change (not magnitude). The proposed observer-based distributed control achieves bounded-error tracking, validated by simulations.
This paper studies robust tracking control for a leader-follower multi-agent system (MAS) subject to disturbances. A challenging problem is considered here, which differs from those in the literature in two aspects. First, we consider the case when all the leader and follower agents are affected by disturbances, while the existing studies assume only the followers to suffer disturbances. Second, we assume the disturbances to be bounded only in rates of change rather than magnitude as in the literature. To address this new problem, we propose a novel observer-based distributed tracking control design. As a distinguishing feature, the followers can cooperatively estimate the disturbance affecting the leader to adjust their maneuvers accordingly, which is enabled by the design of the first-of-its-kind distributed disturbance observers. We build specific tracking control approaches for both first- and second-order MASs and prove that they can lead to bounded-error tracking, despite the challenges due to the relaxed assumptions about disturbances. We further perform simulation to validate the proposed approaches.