Unified output feedback based prescribed performance consensus tracking control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems

This paper proposes an output-feedback based prescribed performance consensus tracking control methodology for a class of heterogeneous multi-agent systems (HMASs) with inconsistent system structure, where the performance behavior is allowed to be different from that of each other. Both the heterogeneous system structures and the nonidentical performance requirements make the control problem much more challenging than that of MASs with identical structure and performance requirement. This is mainly due to the coupling effect of the system dynamics and performance restriction of each agent in the cooperative control action. The key to solve this problem is to introduce a dual-phase performance-guaranteed method, in which the consensus tracking error is decomposed into auxiliary tracking error and filter tracking error and then the whole performance control is decomposed into two phases. By confining the two errors respectively, the practical tracking error can be proved to be explicitly confined within an arbitrarily given performance envelope by merely adjusting the design parameters rather than modifying control structure. Moreover, the prescribed performance control (PPC) result is not only uniform with any initial conditions and design parameters, allowing it to be global, but also unifying both the global and semi-global result into one frame, distinguishing itself from most existing PPC works where either only global or only semi-global result is guaranteed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is confirmed by the simulation conducted on a group of tunnel-diode circuits (TDC).