Time-varying anti-disturbance formation control for high-order non-linear multi-agent systems with switching directed topologies

This study considers the time-varying anti-disturbance formation control problem for a class of high-order uncertain non-linear multi-agent systems with switching directed topologies. A distributed extended state observer (ESO) is constructed to estimate the unknown non-linear dynamics and external disturbances for each agent during the time-varying formation process. Based on the ESO, a novel ESO-based formation protocol is proposed and an algorithm to specify the protocol is derived. The feasibility conditions for the realisation of the anti-disturbance formation under the protocol are also demonstrated. It is rigorously proved that if the feasibility conditions are satisfied and the protocol is designed in the proposed form, the time-varying anti-disturbance formation can be achieved by the high-order uncertain non-linear multi-agent systems with switching directed topologies. The effectiveness and innovations of theoretical results are finally illustrated by some numerical simulations.