LAUSR

Summary Distributed coordinated tracking problems are investigated in this paper for a class of multi-agent dynamical systems with general linear node dynamics under a directed fixing interaction topology. First, a kind of class of distributed information communication protocols based on only the relative output measurements of neighboring agents is proposed and employed to realize containment tracking in multi-leader multi-agent linear systems. With the assumptions that the intrinsic linear dynamics of each agent are stabilizable and detectable, and each follower can be directly or indirectly affected by at least one leader, it is proven that containment tracking in the closed-loop multi-leader multi-agent systems will be guaranteed if the coupling strength between neighboring agents and the gain matrices of the information communication protocols are suitably chosen. The decay rate for containment tracking errors of the considered multi-leader multi-agent system is also discussed. Then, consensus tracking and formation control problems of single-leader multi-agent systems with general linear node dynamics are respectively addressed. At last, node-to-node consensus tracking for multi-agent systems with multiple coupling leaders is discussed. Simulation examples and experiment results are performed to validate the obtained results. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.