Adaptive leader-following consensus control of multi-agent systems using model reference adaptive control approach

This study is devoted to the adaptive consensus problem of multi-agent systems with partly unknown parameters and bounded external disturbances, under the guidance of an active leader with a reference input signal. Firstly, a distributed adaptive protocol is proposed for the system without disturbances by adopting the model reference adaptive control method. Then it is extended to the disturbed system by adding an adaptive disturbance compensator, based on the estimated upper and lower bounds of unknown disturbance. For the above two cases, sufficient conditions are, respectively, given to ensure that all agents can eventually track the prescribed leader. A numerical simulation illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive consensus protocol.