Distributed Adaptive Output Feedback Consensus of Parabolic PDE Agents on Undirected Networks

In this article, we investigate the distributed adaptive consensus problem of parabolic partial differential equation (PDE) agents by output feedback on undirected communication networks, in which two cases of no leader and leader–follower with a leader are taken into account. For the leaderless case, a novel distributed adaptive protocol, namely, the vertex-based protocol, is designed to achieve consensus by taking advantage of the relative output information of itself and its neighbors for any given undirected connected communication graph. For the case of leader–follower, a distributed continuous adaptive controller is put forward to converge the tracking error to a bounded domain by using the Lyapunov function, graph theory, and PDE theory. Furthermore, a corollary that the tracking error tends to zero by replacing the continuous controller with the discontinuous controller is given. Finally, the relevant simulation results are further demonstrated to demonstrate the theoretical results obtained.