Neural-network-based consensus tracking of second-order multi-agent systems with unknown heterogeneous nonlinearities

This paper presents a simple approximation-based design approach for consensus tracking of heterogeneous second-order nonlinear systems under a directed network. All nonlinearities of followers are assumed to be unknown and non-identical. In the controller design procedure, graph-independent error surfaces are used and an unimplementable intermediate controller for each follower is designed at the first design step. Then, by adding and subtracting a graph-based term at the second step, the actual controller for each follower is designed by using one neural network employed to estimate a lumped and distributed nonlinearity. Therefore, the proposed local controller for each follower has a simpler structure than existing approximation-based consensus tracking controllers for multi-agent systems with unmatched nonlinearities. © ICROS 2016.