AbstractThis paper investigates the distributed tracking control problems for a group of networked mechanical systems. We describe three scenarios that motivate these problems. Firstly, under the conditions that the desired time‐varying trajectory is available to a portion of the networked mechanical systems and that the available signals from the neighboring mechanical systems include the position and velocity information, a distributed tracking control strategy is proposed. Next, we remove the requirement for the neighboring mechanical system's velocity information and propose a control method so that the coupling signals among the networked mechanical systems can be only position information. In the third scenario, we assume that only positions are measured for each mechanical system. Distributed nonlinear observers are proposed to estimate the local mechanical system's velocity and acceleration. Based on the estimated states, the distributed controllers are designed to achieve the tracking control. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed control laws.