Leader-Following Cluster Consensus of Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems with Disturbances and Weighted Cooperative-Competitive Networks

With the rapid development of networked cyber-physical systems, the coordinated control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems has attracted increasing attention in applications such as autonomous vehicles, robotic arms, and distributed sensor networks. This paper investigates the leader-following cluster consensus problem for heterogeneous multi-agent systems over weighted cooperative–competitive networks with matched disturbances generated by linear exosystems. Unlike purely cooperative or binary signed networks, the considered network allows interaction weights to take arbitrary positive or negative values, thereby describing both the type and intensity of cooperative or competitive interactions. To handle heterogeneous agent dynamics and matched disturbances, a disturbance-observer-based distributed control protocol is developed for both first-order and second-order followers. Based on path-product-based coordinate transformations and Lyapunov stability analysis, sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee topology-dependent scaled leader-following cluster consensus under interactively balanced and interactively sub-balanced topologies. For interactively unbalanced topologies, a structurally selected pinning control strategy is introduced to compensate for sign conflicts caused by unbalanced directed cycles and ensure global asymptotic convergence. Numerical simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed protocol under heterogeneous dynamics, weighted cooperative–competitive interactions, and matched disturbances.