Suboptimal linear quadratic tracking control for multi-agent systems

This paper investigates the distributed linear quadratic tracking control problem for multi-agent leader–follower systems. Considering that only few followers can access the state information of the leader owing to the limited communication range, a novel distributed control law is designed to make followers convergent to the leader by introducing appropriate interconnections among the followers. Besides the tracking consensus of the leader–follower systems, the designed control law also enables the associated cost to be less than a given tolerance for any initial states of the leader and the followers. The implementation of the designed distributed control law can be executed by solving a single Riccati equation, requiring no global information of the communication topology. Two examples are finally provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.