3,427 research outputs found
Distributed Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems Under Detectability and Communication Constraints
Cooperative control of multi-agent systems has recently gained widespread attention from the scientific communities due to numerous applications in areas such as the formation control in unmanned vehicles, cooperative attitude control of spacecrafts, clustering of micro-satellites, environmental monitoring and exploration by mobile sensor networks, etc. The primary goal of a cooperative control problem for multi-agent systems is to design a decentralized control algorithm for each agent, relying on the local coordination of their actions to exhibit a collective behavior. Common challenges encountered in the study of cooperative control problems are unavailable group-level information, and limited bandwidth of the shared communication. In this dissertation, we investigate one of such cooperative control problems, namely cooperative output regulation, under various local and global level constraints coming from physical and communication limitations.
The objective of the cooperative output regulation problem (CORP) for multi-agent systems is to design a distributed control strategy for the agents to synchronize their state with an external system, called the leader, in the presence of disturbance inputs. For the problem at hand, we additionally consider the scenario in which none of the agents can independently access the synchronization signal from their view of the leader, and therefore it is not possible for the agents to achieve the group objective by themselves unless they cooperate among members. To this end, we devise a novel distributed estimation algorithm to collectively gather the leader states under the discussed detectability constraint, and then use this estimation to synthesize a distributed control solution to the problem.
Next, we extend our results in CORP to the case with uncertain agent dynamics arising from modeling errors. In addition to the detectability constraint, we also assumed that the local regulated error signals are not available to the agents for feedback, and thus none of the agents have all the required measurements to independently synthesize a control solution. By combining the distributed observer and a control law based on the internal model principle for the agents, we offer a solution to the robust CORP under these added constraints.
In practical applications of multi-agent systems, it is difficult to consistently maintain a reliable communication between the agents. By considering such challenge in the communication, we study the CORP for the case when agents are connected through a time-varying communication topology. Due to the presence of the detectability constraint that none of the agents can independently access all the leader states at any switching instant, we devise a distributed estimation algorithm for the agents to collectively reconstruct the leader states. Then by using this estimation, a distributed dynamic control solution is offered to solve the CORP under the added communication constraint. Since the fixed communication network is a special case of this time-varying counterpart, the offered control solution can be viewed as a generalization of the former results.
For effective validation of previous theoretical results, we apply the control algorithms to a practical case study problem on synchronizing the position of networked motors under time-varying communication. Based on our experimental results, we also demonstrate the uniqueness of derived control solutions.
Another communication constraint affecting the cooperative control performance is the presence of network delays. To this regard, first we study the distributed state estimation problem of an autonomous plant by a network of observers under heterogeneous time-invariant delays and then extend to the time-varying counterpart. With the use of a low gain based estimation technique, we derive a sufficient stability condition in terms of the upper bound of the low gain parameter or the time delay to guarantee the convergence of estimation errors. Additionally, when the plant measurements are subject to bounded disturbances, we find that that the local estimation errors also remain bounded. Lastly, by using this estimation, we present a distributed control solution for a leader-follower synchronization problem of a multi-agent system.
Next, we present another case study concerning a synchronization control problem of a group of distributed generators in an islanded microgrid under unknown time-varying latency. Similar to the case of delayed communication in aforementioned works, we offer a low gain based distributed control protocol to synchronize the terminal voltage and inverter operating frequency
Periodic event-triggered output regulation for linear multi-agent systems
This study considers the problem of periodic event-triggered (PET)
cooperative output regulation for a class of linear multi-agent systems. The
advantage of the PET output regulation is that the data transmission and
triggered condition are only needed to be monitored at discrete sampling
instants. It is assumed that only a small number of agents can have access to
the system matrix and states of the leader. Meanwhile, the PET mechanism is
considered not only in the communication between various agents, but also in
the sensor-to-controller and controller-to-actuator transmission channels for
each agent. The above problem set-up will bring some challenges to the
controller design and stability analysis. Based on a novel PET distributed
observer, a PET dynamic output feedback control method is developed for each
follower. Compared with the existing works, our method can naturally exclude
the Zeno behavior, and the inter-event time becomes multiples of the sampling
period. Furthermore, for every follower, the minimum inter-event time can be
determined \textit{a prior}, and computed directly without the knowledge of the
leader information. An example is given to verify and illustrate the
effectiveness of the new design scheme.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures, submitted to Automatica. accepte
An Overview of Recent Progress in the Study of Distributed Multi-agent Coordination
This article reviews some main results and progress in distributed
multi-agent coordination, focusing on papers published in major control systems
and robotics journals since 2006. Distributed coordination of multiple
vehicles, including unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles and
unmanned underwater vehicles, has been a very active research subject studied
extensively by the systems and control community. The recent results in this
area are categorized into several directions, such as consensus, formation
control, optimization, task assignment, and estimation. After the review, a
short discussion section is included to summarize the existing research and to
propose several promising research directions along with some open problems
that are deemed important for further investigations
Decentralized Output Sliding-Mode Fault-Tolerant Control for Heterogeneous Multiagent Systems
This paper proposes a novel decentralized output sliding-mode fault-tolerant control (FTC) design for heterogeneous multiagent systems (MASs) with matched disturbances, unmatched nonlinear interactions, and actuator faults. The respective iteration and iteration-free algorithms in the sliding-mode FTC scheme are designed with adaptive upper bounding laws to automatically compensate the matched and unmatched components. Then, a continuous fault-tolerant protocol in the observer-based integral sliding-mode design is developed to guarantee the asymptotic stability of MASs and the ultimate boundedness of the estimation errors. Simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed FTC algorithm
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