Distributed Tracking of Nonlinear Multiagent Systems Under Directed Switching Topology: An Observer-Based Protocol

This paper deals with a consensus tracking problem for multiagent systems (MASs) with Lipschitz-type nonlinear dynamics and directed switching topology. Unlike most existing works where the relative full state measurements of neighboring agents are utilized, it is assumed that only the relative output measurements of neighboring agents are available for coordination. To achieve consensus tracking in the considered MASs, a new class of observer-based protocols is proposed. By appropriately constructing some topology-dependent multiple Lyapunov functions, it is theoretically shown that distributed consensus tracking in the closed-loop MASs equipped with the designed protocols can be ensured if each possible topology contains a directed spanning tree rooted at the leader and the dwell time for the switchings among different topology is less than a derived positive quantity. Interestingly, it is found that the communication topology for observers' states may be independent with that of the feedback signals. The derived results are further extended to the case of directed switching topology with only average dwell time constraints. Finally, the effectiveness of the analytical results is demonstrated via numerical simulations.