Adaptive Output Consensus of Heterogeneous Nonlinear Multiagent Systems: A Distributed Dynamic Compensator Approach

Distributed dynamic compensators play a key role in the output consensus problem of heterogeneous nonlinear multiagent systems. The existing distributed dynamic compensators require the compensators’ information to be exchanged through communication networks and to satisfy additional stability conditions in the controller design. This article proposes a distributed dynamic compensator to address the adaptive output consensus problem of heterogeneous nonlinear multiagent systems with unknown parameters. The distributed dynamic compensator only requires the output information to be exchanged through communication networks. In addition, the distributed dynamic compensator converts the original consensus problem into standard asymptotic tracking problems of nonlinear systems, without requiring extra stability conditions in the literature. Then, well-established and standard control approaches can be used to design tracking controllers and solve the standard asymptotic tracking problems. This article adopts the standard adaptive backstepping approach as an example to design adaptive tracking controllers. It is further proved that all signals in the closed-loop system are globally uniformly bounded, and the proposed scheme enables the outputs of all agents to track the leader’s signal asymptotically. A simulation is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the design methodology.