Distributed adaptive leaderless output consensus of uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems with heterogenous system orders

This paper is concerned with the leaderless output consensus control problem for uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems with mismatched unknown parameters. Different from currently available results, the considered agents are allowed to have heterogenous and arbitrary system orders. To solve such consensus problem, a novel distributed reference system, whose output serves as a local reference signal, is first designed for each agent. Then, under directed interaction topology condition, a fully distributed leaderless output consensus control scheme is proposed based on adaptive backstepping technique, by using only relative outputs of neighboring agents. It is shown that with the proposed control scheme, all the closed-loop signals are globally uniformly bounded and all the agents’ outputs can reach consensus. Finally, an application example is utilized to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.