Adaptive leader‐following formation for high‐order nonlinear multi‐agent systems with an uncertain leader system over switching networks

Abstract In this article, we study the leader‐following formation problem for high‐order nonlinear multi‐agent systems with an uncertain leader system over switching networks. We first divide the uncertain leader system into two types and then design adaptive distributed observers for them respectively. Then, based on our designed observers, we synthesize two adaptive distributed control laws respectively to solve our problem, forcing the errors between the states of the followers and that of the leader to the prescribed time‐varying desired formation vectors. Finally, our main result is illustrated by two examples.