Smooth Adaptive Leader-Following Consensus Control for Uncertain Fractional-Order Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems with Time-Varying Reference

In this paper, the leader-following consensus control problem is studied for fractional-order nonlinear multi-agent systems in the presence of system uncertainties and unknown external disturbances. An adaptive distributed control scheme is proposed for each agent with a local controller that contains a filter and estimators for estimating the bounds of the fractional-order derivatives of desired trajectory. All the control signals resulted from the control scheme are smooth and they are still able to achieve asymptotic output consensus tracking while ensuring global boundedness of all the closed-loop signals. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control protocol and verify the obtained results.