Leader-follower synchronization with disturbance rejection
Claudio Paliotta, Kristin Ytterstad Pettersen · 2016
A distributed control strategy for leader-follower synchronization of agents with generic linear dynamics affected by constant unknown disturbances is presented. In particular, we consider a group of N + 1 agents, where we have a leader and N followers. The leader's behavior is independent of the followers'. Furthermore, the leader will influence the behavior of all the followers, through consensus between followers, but can communicate only with a subset of the followers. Each agent is affected by a constant unknown disturbance, which in general is different for every agent. We assume that the followers can communicate among themselves according to a directed graph with a spanning tree. The presented distributed control approach gives global asymptotic synchronization of the outputs of each follower with the output of the leader, while the disturbance effect is rejected. Furthermore, we show how our approach can be applied to the formation control of nonlinear under-actuated marine vehicles. In particular, we apply a feedback linearizing controller together with the synchronization strategy which we develop for linear systems. A simulation case study is presented in order to validate the theoretical results.