This paper studies the leader-following rendezvous with connectivity preservation problem for multiple double-integrator systems subject to external disturbances via a self-tuning adaptive distributed observer approach. This approach offers two advantages over the existing approach. First, it removes the existing assumption that all the followers know the system matrix of the leader system. Second, the difficult task of calculating the observer gain is avoided by the employment of the dynamic observer gain. A rigorous analysis shows that our control law is capable of maintaining the connectivity of any initial connected communication network, and achieving the asymptotic tracking and disturbance rejection for a class of leader's signals and external disturbances, which can be the algebraic sum or multiplication of any polynomial functions with any unknown coefficients and sinusoidal functions with arbitrary unknown amplitudes, initial phases, and any frequencies.