Adaptive Leader‐Following Bipartite Consensus of High‐Order Nonlinear Multi‐Agent Systems With Unknown Control Coefficients and Mismatched Uncertainties

Multi‐agent systems (MASs) in cooperative‐competitive networks have wide applications, ranging from social networks to robotic swarms. However, their control design becomes more complicated for systems with high‐order dynamics and multiple uncertainties, due to the inherent strong coupling. This article addresses the adaptive leader‐following bipartite consensus for a class of high‐order uncertain nonlinear systems. Specifically, the leader and followers share the system nonlinearities and matched uncertainties, while the latter additionally allow the unknown control coefficients and mismatched uncertainties. For this, a backstepping‐based adaptive control strategy is developed. Several adaptive gains, one of which directly estimates the unknown control coefficients in the first steps, are designed, thereby ensuring the achievement of asymptotic bipartite consensus. A simulation example validates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.