Cooperative control of multi-agent systems with unknown control directions

This paper deals with the cooperative control problem of high-order multi-agent systems with unknown control directions. Adaptive backstepping technology is utilized to handle the difficulties caused by the unknown control direction in every order’s dynamics. By using a conditional inequality related to multiple terms of the Nussbaum-type function at each step, the consensus problem for systems with undirected and connected topology is solved. Then, it is shown that cooperative asymptotic regulation problem can be addressed by the same design procedure. The agents can achieve consensus and converge to the equilibrium asymptotically as well. Simulation examples are provided finally to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design methods.