High‐order leader‐follower tracking control under limited information availability

Limited information availability represents a fundamental challenge for control of multi‐agent systems, since an agent often lacks sensing capabilities to measure certain states of its own and can exchange data only with its neighbors. The challenge becomes even greater when agents are governed by high‐order dynamics. The present work is motivated to conduct control design for linear and nonlinear high‐order leader‐follower multi‐agent systems in a context where only the first state of an agent is measured. To address this open challenge, we develop novel distributed observers to enable followers to reconstruct unmeasured or unknown quantities about themselves and the leader and on such a basis, build observer‐based tracking control approaches. We analyze the convergence properties of the proposed approaches and validate their performance through simulation.