Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems: A Consensus Region Approach (Automation and Control Engineering)

Distributed controller design is generally a challenging task, especially for multi-agent systems with complex dynamics, due to the interconnected effect of the agent dynamics, the interaction graph among agents, and the cooperative control laws. Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems: A Consensus Region Approach offers a systematic framework for designing distributed controllers for multi-agent systems with general linear agent dynamics, linear agent dynamics with uncertainties, and Lipschitz nonlinear agent dynamics.

Beginning with an introduction to cooperative control and graph theory, this monograph:

• Explores the consensus control problem for continuous-time and discrete-time linear multi-agent systems
• Studies the H∞ and H2 consensus problems for linear multi-agent systems subject to external disturbances
• Designs distributed adaptive consensus protocols for continuous-time linear multi-agent systems
• Considers the distributed tracking control problem for linear multi-agent systems with a leader of nonzero control input
• Examines the distributed containment control problem for the case with multiple leaders
• Covers the robust cooperative control problem for multi-agent systems with linear nominal agent dynamics subject to heterogeneous matching uncertainties
• Discusses the global consensus problem for Lipschitz nonlinear multi-agent systems

Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems: A Consensus Region Approach provides a novel approach to designing distributed cooperative protocols for multi-agent systems with complex dynamics. The proposed consensus region decouples the design of the feedback gain matrices of the cooperative protocols from the communication graph and serves as a measure for the robustness of the protocols to variations of the communication graph. By exploiting the decoupling feature, adaptive cooperative protocols are presented that can be designed and implemented in a fully distributed fashion.