Adaptive cooperative tracking control of higher-order nonlinear systems with unknown dynamics

A practical design method is developed for cooperative tracking control of higher-order nonlinear systems with a dynamic leader. The communication network is a weighted directed graph with a fixed topology. Each follower node is modeled by a higher-order integrator incorporating with unknown nonlinear dynamics and an unknown disturbance. The leader node is modeled as a higher-order nonautonomous nonlinear system. It acts as a command generator giving commands only to a small portion of the networked group. A robust adaptive neural network controller is designed for each follower node such that all follower nodes ultimately synchronize to the leader node with bounded residual errors. Moreover, these controllers are distributed in the sense that the controller design for each follower node only requires relative state information between itself and its neighbors. A simulation example demonstrates the effectiveness of the algorithm.