Resilient coordination of multi-agent systems in the presence of unknown heterogeneous actuation efficiency and coupled dynamics: distributed approaches

Abstract

To guarantee the stability and performance of an overall heterogeneous multi-agent system, feedback control structures must be capable of addressing the presence of heterogeneous agent-based nonlinear uncertainties, unknown actuation performance, and coupling effects. Additionally, some tasks require agents to track the leader's state and reach different states in a distributed way. Therefore, this paper proposes a distributed adaptive controller that drives a set of agents to user-assigned positions in the presence of the mentioned heterogeneous system anomalies. To address actuator dynamics, a hedging-based reference model is used to decouple adaptive updating from the actuator dynamics. To deal with the coupled dynamics, an observer-based estimation algorithm is proposed. Finally, the low-frequency learning method is used to deal with the high-frequency control response and, therefore, to obtain a better transient performance. The overall closed-loop system's stability is investigated using the Lyapunov Stability Theory, and the Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI) technique is employed to identify stability limits regarding the actuator bandwidths of each agent. Illustrative numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the designed controller's performance in a heterogeneous uncertain multi-agent system's dynamics with unknown actuation capabilities and coupled dynamics.