Distributed coordinated tracking for multiple Euler-Lagrange systems

In this paper we study a distributed coordinated tracking problem for networked Euler-Lagrange systems. The objective is for a team of followers modeled by Euler-Lagrange equations to track a leader under the constraints that the leader is a neighbor of only a subset of the followers and the followers have only local interaction. We consider two cases: i) The leader has a constant vector of generalized coordinate derivatives, and ii) The leader has a varying vector of generalized coordinate derivatives. In the first case, we propose a distributed continuous estimator and an adaptive control law to account for parametric uncertainties. In the second case, we propose a model-independent sliding mode control algorithm.