Low-Complexity Distributed Prescribed Performance Control of Unknown Nonlinear Multiagent Systems Under Switching Topologies

This article is concerned with the high-performance leader-following problem for the heterogeneous nonlinear multiagent systems. It is focused on the cases where the underlying communication graph is directed and switching; the model information of each agent is unknown; only the relative output measurement is available for the local controller design. They render the existing distributed high-performance control solutions infeasible. In this article, a distributed robust output-feedback prescribed performance control strategy is put forward to conquer this obstacle. First, the resulting control is off-line designed, regardless of the initial condition or the switching condition. Second, it automatically adjusts the neighborhood errors and the intermediate errors online, against the topology switching. Besides, it is inherently robust to the unknown system dynamics, without parameter identification, function approximation, disturbance estimation, or derivative calculation or estimation. It turns out that global fast accurate output synchronization is achieved by our approach in the sense that the follower outputs track the leader output with the preassigned settling time and accuracy after the topology switching. A comparative simulation is conducted to substantiate the above theoretical findings.