Cooperative Control of Multiple Agents With Unknown High-Frequency Gain Signs Under Unbalanced and Switching Topologies

• Published in: IEEE transactions on automatic control Vol. 64; no. 6; pp. 2495 - 2501
• Main Authors: Wang, Qingling, Psillakis, Haris E., Sun, Changyin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.06.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptive control; Algorithms; Computer simulation; Consensus; Cooperative control; Graph theory; Graphs; Laplace equations; Multi-agent systems; Multiagent systems; Nonlinear control systems; nonlinear PI; Proportional integral; Switching; switching topologies; Topology; unknown control directions
• ISSN: 0018-9286; 1558-2523
• DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2018.2867161

Existing results on cooperative control of multiagent systems with unknown control directions require that the underlying topology is either fixed with a strongly connected graph or switching between different strongly connected graphs. Furthermore, in most cases the graph is assumed to be balanced. This paper proposes a new class of nonlinear proportional-integral (PI) based algorithms to relax these requirements and allow for unbalanced and switching topologies having a jointly strongly connected basis. This is made possible for single-integrator (SI) and double-integrator (DI) agents with nonidentical unknown control directions by a suitable selection of the distributed nonlinear PI functions. Moreover, as a special case, the proposed algorithms are applied to strongly connected and fixed graphs. Finally, simulation examples are given to show the validity of our theoretical results.