Leader–Follower Coordinated Tracking of Multiple Heterogeneous Lagrange Systems Using Continuous Control

In this paper, we study the coordinated tracking problem of multiple heterogeneous Lagrange systems with a dynamic leader. Only nominal parameters of Lagrange dynamics are assumed to be available. Under the local interaction constraints, i.e., the followers only have access to their neighbors’ information and the leader being a neighbor of only a subset of the followers, continuous coordinated tracking algorithms with adaptive coupling gains are proposed. Except for the benefit of the chattering-free control achieved, the proposed algorithm also has the attribute that it does not require the neighbors’ generalized coordinate derivatives. Global asymptotic coordinated tracking is guaranteed, and the tracking errors between the followers and the leader are shown to converge to zero. Examples are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.