In this paper, we investigate a tracking control problem for second-order multi-agent systems. Here, the leader is self-active and cannot be completely measured by all the followers. The interaction network associated with the leader–follower multi-agent system is described by a jointly connected topology, where the topology switches over time and is not strongly connected during each time subinterval. We consider a consensus control of the multi-agent system with or without time delay and propose two categories of neighbour-based control rules for every agent to track the leader, then provide sufficient conditions to ensure that all agents follow the leader, and meanwhile, the tracking errors can be estimated. Finally, some simulation results are presented to demonstrate our theoretical results.