Adaptive Tracking Control for Incommensurate Fractional‐Order Switched Nonlinear Multi‐Agent Systems

ABSTRACT In this paper, we address the problem of adaptive consensus tracking control for a class of incommensurate fractional‐order switched nonlinear multi‐agent systems with external disturbance. All the followers in this study are described as arbitrarily switched heterogeneous fractional‐order systems (FOSs), wherein the difficulty of incommensurate fractional order is solved by employing the continuity of fractional differentiation, and the derivative order of the adaptation laws is not determined by the order of the systems. A distributed adaptive control scheme is proposed within the framework of the backstepping control method, common Lyapunov function, and radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs). By adjusting the parameters appropriately, all the signals of the multi‐agent systems (MASs) are bounded, and the consensus tracking error eventually converges to a small neighborhood of the origin. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified through a numerical simulation example.