The problem of understanding when individual actions of interacting agents display to a coordinated collective behavior has receiving a considerable attention in many research fields. Especially in control engineering, distributed applications in cooperative environments
are achieving resounding success, due to the large number of relevant applications, such as formation control, attitude synchronization tasks and cooperative applications in large-scale systems.
Although those problems have been extensively studied in Literature, themost of classic approaches use to consider the unrealistic scenario in which networks always consist of
identical, linear, time-invariant entities. It’s clear that this assumption strongly approximates the effective behavior of a network. In fact agents can be subjected to parameter uncertainties,
unmodeled dynamics or simply characterized by proper nonlinear dynamics.
Therefore, motivated by those practical problems, the present Thesis proposes various approaches for dealing with the problem of observation and control in both the framework
of multi-agents and complex interconnected systems. The main contributions of this Thesis consist on the development of several algorithms based on concepts of discontinuous slidingmode control. This techniques can be employed for solving in finite-time problems of robust
state estimation and consensus-based synchronization in network of heterogenous nonlinear systems subjected to unknown but bounded disturbances and sudden topological changes.
Both directed and undirected topologies have been taken into account. It is worth to mention also the extension of the consensus problem to networks of agents governed by a class parabolic partial differential equation, for which, for the first time, a boundary-based robust local interaction protocol has been presented
