Distributed observer-based consensus tracking of multi-agent systems with a reference leader

In this paper, the consensus tracking problem of multi-agent systems with a reference leader is considered. It is assumed that only a subset of the following agents can access to the state information of the leader, while all following agents can not be available the bounded reference input of the leader. The dynamics of the agents is given in general form of linear system and the communication topology among the agents is assumed to be undirected and connected. It is assumed that the states of all following agents can not be available directly. To achieve control objective, distributed and local observers are adopted to estimate the agent's state respectively. To track the active leader, a discontinuous control protocol based on the state observers is proposed for each following agent. It is shown that under suitable conditions, all the following agents can track the leader under the designed controller and observers. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate our obtained result.