Leader-follower synchronisation of autonomous agents with external disturbances

The synchronisation problem is investigated for multiple linear agents with external disturbances that are guided by a leader with different dynamics. A method is presented for designing a networked controller that synchronises the agents. First, a general dynamic controller with two inputs is proposed that introduces the model of the leader as an internal reference model into the control loop of all the following agents. Second, the two inputs to the local controllers of the followers are designed by H_∞ control theory such that the resulting closed-loop system achieves the output synchronisation with a desired disturbance attenuation performance. The proposed method is applied to the leader-follower synchronisation of vehicles in a platoon.