Distributed practical output tracking of high-order stochastic multi-agent systems with inherent nonlinear drift and diffusion terms

This paper investigates the distributed tracking problem for a class of high-order stochastic nonlinear multi-agent systems where the subsystem of each agent is driven by nonlinear drift and diffusion terms. For the case where the graph topology is directed and the leader is the neighbor of only a small portion of followers, a new distributed integrator backstepping design method is proposed, and distributed tracking control laws are designed, which can effectively deal with the interactions among agents and coupling terms. By using the algebra graph theory and stochastic analysis, it is shown that the closed-loop system has an almost surely unique solution on [0, infinity), all the states of the closed-loop system are bounded in probability, and the tracking errors can be tuned to arbitrarily small with a tunable exponential converge rate. The efficiency of the tracking controller is demonstrated by a simulation example. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.