Practical time-varying formation tracking for high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems based on the distributed extended state observer

Practical time-varying formation tracking analysis and design problems for high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems are investigated, where the time-varying formation tracking error is controlled within an arbitrarily small bound. The states of followers form a predefined time-varying formation while tracking the state of the leader with unknown control input. Besides, the dynamics of each agent has heterogeneous nonlinearity and disturbance. First, a distributed extended state observer is constructed to estimate the follower's nonlinearity and disturbance, and the leader's unknown control input simultaneously. A protocol based on the distributed extended state observer is proposed. Second, sufficient conditions for the multi-agent systems to achieve the practical time-varying formation tracking under the protocol are presented by using the Lyapunov stability theory. Third, an approach is derived to design the proposed protocol by solving a linear matrix inequality. Finally, numerical simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.