Coordinated tracking for nonlinear multi-agent systems under directed networks

This paper studies a distributed coordinated tracking problem for nonlinear multi-agent systems under a directed topology based on consensus theory. The objective is for a team of followers modeled by nonlinear systems to track a leader under the constrains that only a subset of the followers can receive information of the leader. If the directed graph associated with the leader and the followers contains a directed spanning tree, with the proposed control algorithm, all followers can track the leader asymptotically. And the conditions of the topology is necessary to achieve the objective. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.