Estimator‐based adaptive neural network control of leader‐follower high‐order nonlinear multiagent systems with actuator faults

The problem of distributed cooperative control for networked multiagent systems is investigated in this paper. Each agent is modeled as an uncertain nonlinear high‐order system incorporating with model uncertainty, unknown external disturbance, and actuator fault. The communication network between followers can be an undirected or a directed graph, and only some of the follower agents can obtain the commands from the leader. To develop the distributed cooperative control algorithm, a prefilter is designed, which can derive the state‐space representation to a newly constructed plant. Then, a set of distributed adaptive neural network controllers are designed by making certain modifications on traditional backstepping techniques with the aid of adaptive control, neural network control, and a second‐order sliding mode estimator. Rigorous proving procedures are provided, which show that uniform ultimate boundedness of all the tracking errors can be achieved in a networked multiagent system. Finally, a numerical simulation is carried out to evaluate the theoretical results.