Optimal Consensus Control of Unknown Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems Using Adaptive Dynamic Programming via MRAC

Abstract

This paper introduces an optimal consensus control scheme for nonlinear multi-agent systems with completely unknown dynamics. In general, it is difficult to solve the coupled Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations, which the optimal consensus control relies on in multi-agent systems, especially unknown nonlinear systems. For the purpose of solving the problem, we propose an optimal consensus control approach based on the model reference adaptive control (MRAC) and adaptive dynamic programming (ADP). Using the structure of the diagonal recurrent neural network, the identifier and controller are devised to achieve MRAC for every plant of the unknown nonlinear systems, i.e. the reference model serves as a dynamic model of each individual agent. Then, according to reference models of distributed agents, an adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) is introduced to approximate the solution of the coupled HJB equations.