Adaptive output consensus of heterogeneous nonlinear multi‐agent system under random link failures with partially unknown transition rates

Abstract Considering the complexity of communication environment in reality, this paper investigates the adaptive output consensus problem for heterogeneous nonlinear multi‐agent system (MAS) under random link failures, in which connection of each link may suffer from link failure. The major challenge lies in dealing with the coupling among different nonlinearities and integrator orders of heterogeneous agents while the distributed communication may fail randomly. Hence, a two‐level distributed adaptive control scheme based on the virtual model‐reference strategy will be presented. In the first level, virtual reference models are constructed to deal with the uncertainties caused by the random link failures, and a distributed consensus control strategy is designed based on the established communication observer of each agent. In the second level, an adaptive backstepping tracking controller drives each agent's output to follow its virtual reference model and compensate for the agent's uncertainties. The mean square stability of the controlled MAS has been rigorously proved. An illustrative example is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the given control scheme.