The leader-following consensus for multiple uncertain Euler-Lagrange systems with a distributed adaptive observer

The leader-following consensus problem of multiple uncertain Euler-Lagrange systems under switching network topology was studied using the distributed observer approach in one of our recent papers. However, the distributed observer in that paper assumed that all the followers knew the system matrix of the leader system. In this paper, we first propose a distributed adaptive observer which only assumes those followers who are the children of the leader know the system matrix of the leader system. Then, we further develop a distributive adaptive controller utilizing this distributed adaptive observer to solve the same problem as studied in our previous paper. As a result, we have removed the assumption that all the followers need to know the system matrix of the leader system.