Coordinated Control and Estimation of Multiagent Systems with Engineering Applications

Recently, coordinated control and estimation problems have attracted a great deal of attention in different fields especially in biology, physics, computer science, and control engineering. Coordinated control and estimation problems have prominent characteristics of distributed control, local interaction, and self-organization. Research on multiagent coordinated control and estimation problems not only helps better understand the mechanisms of natural collective phenomena but also benefits the applications of cyberphysical systems. This special issue focuses on theoretical and technological achievements in cooperative multiagent Systems. It contains twenty-six papers, the contents of which are summarized below

A Survey and Analysis of Cooperative Multi-Agent Robot Systems: Challenges and Directions

Research in the area of cooperative multi-agent robot systems has received wide attention among researchers in recent years. The main concern is to find the effective coordination among autonomous agents to perform the task in order to achieve a high quality of overall performance. Therefore, this paper reviewed various selected literatures primarily from recent conference proceedings and journals related to cooperation and coordination of multi-agent robot systems (MARS). The problems, issues, and directions of MARS research have been investigated in the literature reviews. Three main elements of MARS which are the type of agents, control architectures, and communications were discussed thoroughly in the beginning of this paper. A series of problems together with the issues were analyzed and reviewed, which included centralized and decentralized control, consensus, containment, formation, task allocation, intelligences, optimization and communications of multi-agent robots. Since the research in the field of multi-agent robot research is expanding, some issues and future challenges in MARS are recalled, discussed and clarified with future directions. Finally, the paper is concluded with some recommendations with respect to multi-agent systems

Estimator-based adaptive neural network control of leader-follower high-order nonlinear multiagent systems with actuator faults

The problem of distributed cooperative control for networked multiagent systems is investigated in this paper. Each agent is modeled as an uncertain nonlinear high-order system incorporating with model uncertainty, unknown external disturbance, and actuator fault. The communication network between followers can be an undirected or a directed graph, and only some of the follower agents can obtain the commands from the leader. To develop the distributed cooperative control algorithm, a prefilter is designed, which can derive the state-space representation to a newly constructed plant. Then, a set of distributed adaptive neural network controllers are designed by making certain modifications on traditional backstepping techniques with the aid of adaptive control, neural network control, and a second-order sliding mode estimator. Rigorous proving procedures are provided,which show that uniform ultimate boundedness of all the tracking errors can be achieved in a networked multiagent system. Finally, a numerical simulation is carried out to evaluate the theoretical results