Neuro-adaptive cooperative tracking control of unknown higher-order affine nonlinear systems

In this paper we propose a practical design method for distributed cooperative tracking control of a class of higher-order nonlinear multi-agent systems. Dynamics of the agents (also called the nodes) are assumed to be unknown to the controller and are estimated using Neural Networks. Linearization-based robust neuro-adaptive controller driving the follower nodes to track the trajectory of the leader node is proposed. The nodes are connected through a weighted directed graph with a time-invariant topology. In addition to the fact that only few nodes have access to the leader, communication among the follower nodes is limited with some nodes having access to the information of their neighbor nodes only. Command generated by the leader node is ultimately followed by the followers with bounded synchronization error. The proposed controller is well-defined in the sense that control effort is restrained to practical limits. The closed-loop system dynamics are proved to be stable and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.