Decentralized adaptive control for time-varying formation tracking of multi-agent system

A decentralized adaptive control approach is developed for trajectory tracking of multi-agent formation. The system consists of multiple agents with nonlinearities and uncertainties. The agent can only get information from their neighbors. A digraph is utilized to describe the communication network among the agents. Decentralized strategy is designed since some agents can only get local information from the neighbors. Dynamic surface technique is applied to deal with nonlinear dynamics, and several tuning functions are designed to estimate the uncertainties. Stability analysis proves that the developed control scheme can form and keep the formation shape of multi-agent system while tracking the reference trajectory. Numerical simulation is given to illustrate the advantages of the control approach.