Adaptive consensus for high-order unknown nonlinear multi-agent systems with unknown control directions and switching topologies

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive assessment of the consensus of high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems with input saturation and time-varying disturbance under switching topologies. The control directions and model parameters of agents are supposed to be unknown. Our approach is based on transforming the problem of consensus for a network that consists of high-order nonlinear agents to that of perturbed first-order multi-agent systems. The unknown part of dynamics is cancelled using radial basis neural networks. Nussbaum gains and auxiliary systems are respectively employed to overcome the unknown input direction and the saturation. Adaptive sliding mode control is used to compensate for the time-varying disturbance and the imperfect approximation of the developed neural network as well. Through Lyapunov analysis, it is shown that the overall closed-loop system maintains asymptotic stability. Finally, our approach is applied to a group of multiple single-link flexible joint manipulators to highlight better its merit.