Consensus Control for Leader-follower Multi-agent Systems under Prescribed Performance Guarantees

This paper addresses the problem of distributed control for leader-follower multi-agent systems under prescribed performance guarantees. Leader-follower is meant in the sense that a group of agents with external inputs are selected as leaders in order to drive the group of followers in a way that the entire system can achieve consensus within certain prescribed performance transient bounds. Under the assumption of tree graphs, a distributed control law is proposed when the decay rate of the performance functions is within a sufficient bound. Then, two classes of tree graphs that can have additional followers are investigated. Finally, several simulation examples are given to illustrate the results.Comment: 8 page

Neural Network Observer-Based Prescribed-Time Fault-Tolerant Tracking Control for Heterogeneous Multiagent Systems With a Leader of Unknown Disturbances

This study investigates the prescribed-time leader-follower formation strategy for heterogeneous multiagent sys-tems including unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ground vehicles under time-varying actuator faults and unknown dis-turbances based on adaptive neural network observers and backstepping method. Compared with the relevant works, the matching and mismatched disturbances of the leader agent are further taken into account in this study. A distributed fixed-time observer is developed for follower agents in order to timely obtain the position and velocity states of the leader, in which neural networks are employed to approximate the unknown disturbances. Furthermore, the actual sensor limitations make each follower only affected by local information and measurable local states. As a result, another fixed-time neural network observer is proposed to obtain the unknown states and the complex uncertainties. Then, a backstepping prescribed-time fault-tolerant formation controller is constructed by utilizing the estimations, which not only guarantees that the multiagent systems realize the desired formation configuration in a user-assignable finite time, but also ensures that the control action can be smooth everywhere. Finally, simulation examples are designed to testify the validity of the developed theoretical method

Adaptive and Optimal Motion Control of Multi-UAV Systems

This thesis studies trajectory tracking and coordination control problems for single and multi unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems. These control problems are addressed for both quadrotor and fixed-wing UAV cases. Despite the fact that the literature has some approaches for both problems, most of the previous studies have implementation challenges on real-time systems. In this thesis, we use a hierarchical modular approach where the high-level coordination and formation control tasks are separated from low-level individual UAV motion control tasks. This separation helps efficient and systematic optimal control synthesis robust to effects of nonlinearities, uncertainties and external disturbances at both levels, independently. The modular two-level control structure is convenient in extending single-UAV motion control design to coordination control of multi-UAV systems. Therefore, we examine single quadrotor UAV trajectory tracking problems to develop advanced controllers compensating effects of nonlinearities and uncertainties, and improving robustness and optimality for tracking performance. At fi rst, a novel adaptive linear quadratic tracking (ALQT) scheme is developed for stabilization and optimal attitude control of the quadrotor UAV system. In the implementation, the proposed scheme is integrated with Kalman based reliable attitude estimators, which compensate measurement noises. Next, in order to guarantee prescribed transient and steady-state tracking performances, we have designed a novel backstepping based adaptive controller that is robust to effects of underactuated dynamics, nonlinearities and model uncertainties, e.g., inertial and rotational drag uncertainties. The tracking performance is guaranteed to utilize a prescribed performance bound (PPB) based error transformation. In the coordination control of multi-UAV systems, following the two-level control structure, at high-level, we design a distributed hierarchical (leader-follower) 3D formation control scheme. Then, the low-level control design is based on the optimal and adaptive control designs performed for each quadrotor UAV separately. As particular approaches, we design an adaptive mixing controller (AMC) to improve robustness to varying parametric uncertainties and an adaptive linear quadratic controller (ALQC). Lastly, for planar motion, especially for constant altitude flight of fixed-wing UAVs, in 2D, a distributed hierarchical (leader-follower) formation control scheme at the high-level and a linear quadratic tracking (LQT) scheme at the low-level are developed for tracking and formation control problems of the fixed-wing UAV systems to examine the non-holonomic motion case. The proposed control methods are tested via simulations and experiments on a multi-quadrotor UAV system testbed

Synchronization of multiple rigid body systems: a survey

The multi-agent system has been a hot topic in the past few decades owing to its lower cost, higher robustness, and higher flexibility. As a particular multi-agent system, the multiple rigid body system received a growing interest since its wide applications in transportation, aerospace, and ocean exploration. Due to the non-Euclidean configuration space of attitudes and the inherent nonlinearity of the dynamics of rigid body systems, synchronization of multiple rigid body systems is quite challenging. This paper aims to present an overview of the recent progress in synchronization of multiple rigid body systems from the view of two fundamental problems. The first problem focuses on attitude synchronization, while the second one focuses on cooperative motion control in that rotation and translation dynamics are coupled. Finally, a summary and future directions are given in the conclusion

Event-Triggered Multi-Lane Fusion Control for 2-D Vehicle Platoon Systems with Distance Constraints

This paper investigates the event-triggered fixedtime multi-lane fusion control for vehicle platoon systems with distance keeping constraints where the vehicles are spread in multiple lanes. To realize the fusion of vehicles in different lanes, the vehicle platoon systems are firstly constructed with respect to a two-dimensional (2-D) plane. In case of the collision and loss of effective communication, the distance constraints for each vehicle are guaranteed by a barrier function-based control strategy. In contrast to the existing results regarding the command filter techniques, the proposed distance keeping controller can constrain the distance tracking error directly and the error generated by the command filter is coped with by adaptive fuzzy control technique. Moreover, to offset the impacts of the unknown system dynamics and the external disturbances, an unknown input reconstruction method with asymptotic convergence is developed by utilizing the interval observer technique. Finally, two relative threshold triggering mechanisms are utilized in the proposed fixed-time multi-lane fusion controller design so as to reduce the communication burden. The corresponding simulation results also verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy

Distributed coordinate tracking control of multiple wheeled mobile robots

In this thesis, distributed coordinate tracking control of multiple wheeled-mobile robots is studied. Control algorithms are proposed for both kinematic and dynamic models. All vehicle agents share the same mechanical structure. The communication topology is leader-follower topology and the reference signal is generated by the virtual leader. We will introduce two common kinematic models of WMR and control algorithms are proposed for both kinematic models with the aid of graph theory. Since it is more realistic that the control inputs are torques so dynamic extension is studied following by the kinematics. Torque controllers are designed with the aid of backstepping method so that the velocities of the mobile robots converge to the desired velocities. Because of the fact that in practice, the inertial parameter of WMR maybe not exactly known or even unknown, so both dynamics with and without inertial uncertainties are considered in this thesis