Leader-Following Consensus of Multiple Uncertain Rigid Body Systems by a Sampled-Data Adaptive Distributed Observer

In this paper, we study the leader-following attitude consensus problem for multiple uncertain rigid body systems by a sampled-data adaptive distributed observer. Unlike the existing sampled-data distributed observer, which can only asymptotically estimate the state of the leader, the sampled-data adaptive distributed observer can estimate both the state and the system matrix of the leader exponentially. We synthesize a distributed control law utilizing sampled-data communications to solve the leader-following attitude consensus problem for multiple uncertain rigid body systems based on the sampled-data adaptive distributed observer. Moreover, we present a sufficient condition for guaranteeing the convergence of the estimated unknown parameters to their true values. Compared with a distributed control law that uses continuous-time communications, the distributed control law utilizing sampled-data communications consumes fewer communication resources and is more robust to communication failures. The effectiveness of our approach is verified by a numerical example.