Summary
This paper studies coordinated control of multiple Lagrangian systems with parametric uncertainties subject to external disturbances by proposing a fully distributed continuous control law based on the improved self‐tuning adaptive observer inspired by non‐identifier‐based high‐gain adaptive control technique. Under this distributed continuous control law, a group of Lagrangian systems are driven to the convex hull spanned by multiple heterogenous dynamic leaders, which can be any combination of step signals of arbitrary unknown magnitudes, ramp signals of arbitrary unknown slopes, and sinusoidal signals of arbitrary unknown amplitudes, initial phases, and any unknown frequencies. It is also worth to mention that this control law we propose, depending neither on any information of leader systems for uninformed followers, nor on external disturbances, even independent of neighbors' velocity, can achieve asymptotic tracking of multiple leaders without any additional condition instead of ensuring the ultimate boundedness of the containment error as in the literature. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.