Brief paper: distributed adaptive consensus tracking of a class of networked non-linear systems with parametric uncertainties

This study investigates a distributed adaptive consensus tracking problem for multiple non-linear strict-feedback systems with parametric uncertainties under a directed communication graph topology. It is assumed that the information of a leader is available for only a limited subset of followers. The distributed adaptive dynamic surface design approach is presented to design the local controller of each follower to guarantee that all networked followers with unmatched parametric uncertainties synchronise to the leader regardless of a lack of the shared information on the communication links. From the Lyapunov stability theorem, it is shown that the consensus tracking errors are cooperatively semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded and converge to an adjustable neighbourhood of the origin.