Robust consensus tracking of second-order nonlinear systems using relative position information by K-filter and disturbance observer based control

This work considers the problem of distributed consensus tracking control of second-order uncertain nonlinear systems under a directed communication graph which contains a spanning tree, where the leader node is the root. It is assumed that the followers receive only the relative positions from the neighbours. For the purpose of consensus tracking controller design, in each follower, a group of K-filters is introduced so that the necessity of velocity estimating is avoided. Then we can express each follower's tracking error dynamics as a second-order system with mismatched uncertainties. And hence we can design a robust consensus tracking controller for each follower by using the combination of the backstepping design and the disturbance observer based control using only relative position information. Theoretical analysis is performed to show that the DOBs' estimation errors can be made to decay to be sufficiently small very quickly before the system states escape from the feasible region. Then we show that all the followers' states track those of the leader with arbitrarily small ultimate error bounds. And simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.