ABSTRACT This paper studies the tracking control problem for a class of uncertain nonlinear multiagent systems under an undirected communication topology. An improved self‐triggered mechanism is proposed, which incorporates the performance‐based exponential term to address the negative impact of excessive update intervals on the system. Then, an observer‐based distributed output feedback control strategy with the improved self‐triggered mechanism is proposed to realize the control objective of consensus tracking. Specifically, a reference generator is presented, so that the control strategy only needs to obtain communication information from the reference generator. By applying filtered high‐gain observers, immeasurable states are estimated, and the sensitivity to measurement noise is reduced. Finally, a numerical simulation is carried out to prove the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.