Control Problem For Multi-agent Systems Research Articles

Adaptive expected-time tracking consensus control for multiagent systems with external disturbances and time delays

This paper studies the expected-time tracking control problem for multiagent systems with disturbances and time delays. The expected-time control scheme can ensure that control objectives can be completed within the desired time. In the other words, the output signal can track the reference signal in an expected time. Based on a special error and the adaptive technology, the expected-time tracking consensus control scheme is achieved. Moreover, by using the neural networks technique, the unknown nonlinear functions which often exist in the dynamic of the system are handled. According to the Lyapunov stability theorem and the Lyapunov–Krasovskii function, it is proved that the consensus errors are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded. At last, the feasibility of the control method is verified by a simulation example.

Distributed event-triggered collaborative control for multiagent systems against DoS attacks

This paper deals with the event-triggered collaborative control problem of multiagent systems (MASs) under denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. For large-scale MASs, it is difficult to implement fully distributed collaborative control by tuning the coupling strengths of all edges due to the limitation of computing resources in practical applications. To overcome this difficulty, an edge-pinning-based adaptive strategy for coupling strengths is established, under which only the coupling strengths of partial edges are tuned instead of all ones. Under this strategy, the edge-pinning-based resilient distributed event-triggered synchronous and asynchronous adaptive laws are designed, both of which ensure the implementation of security consensus against DoS attacks and the elimination of Zeno behavior. It should be pointed out that the designed two resilient consensus strategies are fully distributed. Additionally, under these event-triggered strategies, the updating of control protocols and the monitoring of triggering functions do not require continuous communications, thus reducing the communication burden among agents. Finally, simulations conducted on a network composed by six aircrafts are provided to illustrate the theoretical results.

Robust Distributed Containment Control with Adaptive Performance and Collision Avoidance for Multi-Agent Systems

This paper deals with the containment control problem for multi-agent systems. The objective is to develop a distributed control scheme that leads a sub-group of the agents, called followers, within the convex hull that is formed by the leaders, which operate autonomously. Towards this direction, we propose a twofold approach comprising the following: (i) a cyber layer, where the agents establish, through the communication network, a consensus on a reference trajectory that converges exponentially fast within the convex hull of the leaders and (ii) a physical layer, where each agent tracks the aforementioned trajectory while avoiding collisions with other members of the multi-agent team. The main contributions of this work lie in the robustness of the proposed framework in both the trajectory estimation and the tracking control tasks, as well as the guaranteed collision avoidance, despite the presence of dynamic leaders and bounded but unstructured disturbances. A simulation study of a multi-agent system composed of five followers and four leaders demonstrates the applicability of the proposed scheme and verifies its robustness against both external disturbances that act on the follower model and the dynamic motion of the leaders. A comparison with a related work is also included to outline the strong properties of the proposed approach.

Containment control for second-order multi-agent systems with time-varying delays via variable-augmented-based free-weighting matrices

This paper investigates the containment control problem for multi-agent systems (MASs), where the time-varying communication delays are considered. The aim of this paper is to introduce new methods for the containment control research of MASs with time-varying delays. To obtain better results on maximum admissible upper bounds (MAUBs) of the delays to ensure the containment control, the variable-augmented-based free-weighting matrices (VABFWMs) method is introduced to avoid the higher-order terms of time-varying delays in estimating the derivative of the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals (LKFs). So our method no longer requires the quadratic function negative-determination lemma. In addition, by utilizing the proposed method, we design a containment controller to ensure that all followers are included into the convex hull formed by leaders. Finally, a numerical example is presented to illustrate the feasibility and superiority of our method.

Energy-Efficient Distributed Formation Control of Sampled-Data Multiagent Systems With Packet Losses.

This article investigates an energy-efficient formation control problem for multiagent systems with sampled data and random packet losses. A Bernoulli stochastic variable is used to describe packet losses, which is defined relative to the transmission energy consumed by antennas. A distributed sampled-data formation control law is designed and some analytic sufficient conditions on the formation control are derived. It is revealed that the sampling period, control parameters, network topology, as well as the transmission energy used by sensors impose inherent limitations in achieving the formation. Also, a method for searching the minimum allowable transmission energy is presented. Finally, numerical simulations are shown for illustration and verification.

Periodic event-triggered bipartite containment control for nonlinear multi-agent systems with iuput delay

This paper studies the periodic event-triggered bipartite containment control problem of multi-agent systems with unmeasurable states and input delays. To deal with the system input delay problem, a Pade approximation technique is introduced. By utilising the sampled output of the system, a fuzzy state observer is constructed to estimate the unknown state. A periodic event-triggered mechanism is designed, which can effectively reduce the usage of communication resources. Compared with the traditional event-triggered control manner, a periodic event-triggered control manner only monitors the preset threshold condition at the sampling instant to determine whether to update the current control signal, which can automatically guarantee the minimum lower bound of the execution interval, avoiding the occurrence of Zeno behaviour. Stability analysis verifies that all signals in the closed-loop system are bounded, and the bipartite tracking error can converge to a small neighbourhood of the origin. Finally, a practical example further verifies the effectiveness of the designed control scheme.

Dual-Event-Triggered Intelligence Security Control for Multiagent Systems Against DoS Attacks With Applications in Mobile Robot Systems

The intelligence security control problem of multiagent systems in the presence of actuator faults is investigated against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Noticing that the DoS attacks usually make the actuator signal not available for distributed control protocols, a novel intelligence dual-eventtriggered control strategy is developed to eliminate the impact of DoS attacks. This control strategy includes two related event triggers respectively set on different channels, in which the second event-triggered condition is related to the triggering sequence of the previous event. Through the coordination between two nested event triggers set on different channels, the controller is avoided by being affected by wrong signals caused by DoS attacks. The developed distributed control protocol can not only guarantee the realization of the tracking control task but also ensure that no ‘Zeno behavior” occurs in the process of the event triggering. Moreover, the obtained results are applied to the mobile robot systems. Finally, a numerical simulation example and a mobile robot system application are given to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

Fixed time containment control of multi-agent system under multi-source mismatched disturbance

Aiming at the cooperative control problem of multi-agent system, the fixed-time containment control of general second-order multi-agent system under mismatched disturbances is studied. Firstly, the problem of multi-agent system fixed-time containment control in ideal state is analyzed, and a distributed control protocol based on variable structure control is proposed. Then, a nonlinear fixed-time disturbance observer is designed, aiming at the mismatched disturbance, and a fixed-time control protocol based on the nonlinear disturbance observer is proposed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control protocol under switching topology and multi-source disturbance is verified by numerical simulation.

Dynamic Event-Driven Finite-Horizon Optimal Consensus Control for Constrained Multiagent Systems.

This article investigates the event-driven finite-horizon optimal consensus control problem for multiagent systems with symmetric or asymmetric input constraints. Initially, in order to overcome the difficulty that the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation is time-varying in finite-horizon optimal control, a single critic neural network (NN) with time-varying activation function is applied to obtain the approximate optimal control. Meanwhile, for minimizing the terminal error to satisfy the terminal constraint of the value function, an augmented error vector containing the Bellman residual and the terminal error is constructed to update the weight of the NN. Furthermore, an improved learning law is proposed, which relaxes the tricky persistence excitation condition and eliminates the requirement of initial stability control. Moreover, a specific algorithm is designed to update the historical dataset, which can effectively accelerate the convergence rate of network weight. In addition, to improve the utilization rate of the communication resource, an effective dynamic event-triggering mechanism (DETM) composed of dynamic threshold parameters (DTPs) and auxiliary dynamic variables (ADVs) is designed, which is more flexible compared with the ADV-based DETM or DTP-based DETM. Finally, to support the effectiveness of the proposed method and the superiority of the designed DETM, a simulation example is provided.

Sampled-based adaptive event-triggered resilient control for multiagent systems with hybrid cyber-attacks

The multiagent systems have shared broad application in many practical systems including unmanned aircraft clusters, intelligent robots, and intelligent transportation. However, many unexpected cyber-attacks may disturb or disrupt the normal communication of the agents, thus reducing the interacting efficiency of multiagent systems. Ever since the cyber-attacks have been proposed, the resilient control problem for multiagent systems has been intensively explored in light of the communication network growth. However, most of the consequences only focused on denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or deception attacks independently. Distinguished from the existing resilient control mechanisms, the current investigation represents the first attempt at designing an adaptive resilient controller for multiagent systems according to the sampled-based adaptive event-triggered manner, where denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and deception attacks are both considered. First, the hybrid cyber-attacks model and its impact on the closed-loop system are addressed. And then, an adaptive event-triggered strategy is proposed to reduce network resource consumption and ease the communication burden, where the designed adaptive law can automatically adjust the triggering threshold. Finally, the consensus state of multiagent systems is capable of achieving via a series of reasonable control rules formulated through Lyapunov functional approach despite suffering hybrid cyber-attacks. And a simulation example is given to substantiate the feasibility of the proposed method.

Nonfragile containment control of nonlinear multi‐agent systems via a disturbance observer‐based approach

AbstractIn this article, we consider the nonfragile containment control problem of nonlinear multi‐agent systems (MASs) with exogenous disturbance where the communication links among agents under consideration is directed. Firstly, based on relative output measurements between the agent and its neighbors, a disturbance observer‐based control protocol is proposed to solve the containment control problem of MASs with inherent nonlinear dynamics and exogenous disturbances. Secondly, because of the additional tuning of parameters in the real control systems, uncertainties in the designing of observer and controller gains always occur, and as a result, an output feedback controller with disturbance rejection is conceived and the containment control problem of nonlinear MASs with nonfragility is thoroughly investigated. Then, depending on matrix transformation and inequality technique, sufficient conditions of the designed controller gains exist, which is derived from the asymptotic stability analysis problem of some containment error dynamics of MASs. Finally, two simulation examples are exploited to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

Secured consensus control for multi-agent systems under DoS attacks: Coding–decoding communication protocol

This paper focuses on the leader following consensus control problem for multi-agent systems (MASs) subject to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. First, a sliding mode observer is developed to estimate each agent state, actuator, and sensor fault. Then, a coding–decoding communication protocol is proposed to enhance the communication security between agents. Based on the sliding mode observer and communication protocol, a leader-following consensus controller is designed to guarantee the consensus and input-to-state stability of MASs under DoS attacks. Finally, the effectiveness of the developed controller is verified by a simulation example.

Neuroadaptive Performance Guaranteed Control for Multiagent Systems With Power Integrators and Unknown Measurement Sensitivity.

This article investigates the adaptive performance guaranteed tracking control problem for multiagent systems (MASs) with power integrators and measurement sensitivity. Different from the structural characteristics of existing results, the dynamic of each agent is a power exponential function. A method called adding a power integrator technique is introduced to guarantee that the consensus is achieved of the MASs with power integrators. Different from existing prescribed performance tracking control results for MASs, a new performance guaranteed control approach is proposed in this article, which can guarantee that the relative position error between neighboring agents can converge into the prescribed boundary within preassigned finite time. By utilizing the Nussbaum gain technique and neural networks, a novel control scheme is proposed to solve the unknown measurement sensitivity on the sensor, which successfully relaxes the restrictive condition that the unknown measurement sensitivity must be within a specific range. Based on the Lyapunov functional method, it is proven that the relative position error between neighboring agents can converge into the prescribed boundary within preassigned finite time. Finally, a simulation example is proposed to verify the availability of the control strategy.

Distributed adaptive event-triggered asymptotic tracking control of linear uncertain multiagent systems by using output only

For the robust tracking control problem of multiagent systems with linear uncertainties, most of the existing studies require full state feedback. Moreover, the designed control strategy also uses global information, such as the number of agents or the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix, which does not satisfy the distributed requirement for multiagent design. To address these problems, first, a Luenburger observer is designed to observe the full state of the system by using the output information. Second, the constant gain in the traditional distributed observer for estimating exosystem state information is replaced with a time-varying gain that comes from the output of a newly designed filter, which avoids the use of the global information mentioned above. Finally, based on the above observer and adaptive dynamic feedback, an event-triggered output feedback control strategy is given. This control strategy is not only piecewise constant, which is easy to implement, but also makes the robust tracking control error converge asymptotically to zero. Furthermore, it is theoretically proven that each agent does not have Zeno behaviour, and the effectiveness of the designed control strategy is verified with a simulation example.

Distributed Fault-Tolerant Containment Control Protocols for the Discrete-Time Multiagent Systems via Reinforcement Learning Method.

This article investigates the model-free fault-tolerant containment control problem for multiagent systems (MASs) with time-varying actuator faults. Depending on the relative state information of neighbors, a distributed containment control method based on reinforcement learning (RL) is adopted to achieve containment control objective without prior knowledge on the system dynamics. First, based on the information of agent itself and its neighbors, a containment error system is established. Then, the optimal containment control problem is transformed into an optimal regulation problem for the containment error system. Furthermore, the RL-based policy iteration method is employed to deal with the corresponding optimal regulation problem, and the nominal controller is proposed for the original fault-free system. Based on the nominal controller, a fault-tolerant controller is further developed to compensate for the influence of actuator faults on MAS. Meanwhile, the uniform boundedness of the containment errors can be guaranteed by using the presented control scheme. Finally, numerical simulations are given to show the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.

An RNN-Based Performance Identification Model for Multi-Agent Containment Control Systems

In the containment control problem of multi-agent systems (MASs), the convergence of followers is always a potential threat to the security of system operations. From the perspective of system topology, the inherently non-linear properties of the algebraic connectivity of the follower2follower (F2F) network, combined with the influence of the leader2follower (L2F) topology on the system, make it difficult to design the convergence positions of the followers through mere mathematical analysis. Therefore, in the background of temporary networking tasks for large-scale systems, to achieve the goal of forecasting the performance of the whole system when networking is only completed with local information, this paper investigates the application and effectiveness of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in the containment control system performance identification, thus improving the efficiency of system networking while ensuring system security. Two types of identification models based on two types of neural networks (NNs), MLP and standard RNN are developed, according to the range of information required for performance identification. Evaluation of the models is carried out by means of the coefficient of determination (R2) as well as the root-mean-square error (RMSE). The results show that each model may produce a better forecasting accuracy than the other models in specific cases, with models based on the standard RNN possessing smaller errors. With the proposed method, model identification can be achieved, but in-depth development of the model in further studies is still necessary to the extent the accuracy of the model.

NNs-observer-based fully distributed consensus control for MASs under deception attacks

This paper proposes a novel resilient intrusion-tolerance control scheme to solve the consensus control problem of multi-agent systems (MASs) under deception attacks. Consider the state unavailability of MASs with unknown nonlinear terms, the unmeasurable state is estimated by designing the neural-networks(NNs)-based observer. Then, a fully distributed intrusion-tolerant adaptive protocol is developed to implement the consensus control task. The designed control strategy only involves the agent states that interact with the neighboring agent and does not relate to the whole communication topology information. The designed controller can ensure that the consensus error of the nonlinear MASs is eventually ultimately bounded under deception attacks. Finally, a numerical simulation is provided to verify the feasibility of the designed scheme.

Bipartite Flocking Control for Multi-Agent Systems With Cooperation-Competition Interactions and Random Packet Dropouts

This paper addresses the bipartite flocking control problem of multi-agent systems with random packet dropouts, in which cooperative and competitive information interactions among agents are described by a signed network. The random packet dropouts are denoted by Bernoulli random variable and the information transmission failure between adjacent agents is possible at every time step. In this case, the unreliable information transmission within multi-agent systems may lead to behavioral dispersion and instability. To solve this problem, a novel fully distributed control scheme is designed. In light of the convergence method for products of infinite sub-stochastic matrices, the bipartite flocking control can be global almost sure to achieve and some essentially algebraic conditions are established. Finally, the effectiveness of the control scheme under random packet dropouts is illustrated by a numerical simulation example.

Prescribed-time containment control of high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems based on distributed observer

This paper investigates the prescribed-time containment control problem for multi-agent systems with high-order nonlinear dynamics under a directed communication topology. Firstly, in view of the fact that only some follower agents can directly access the state information of multiple leader agents, a prescribed-time distributed observer is put forward to estimate the convex hull spanned by these leaders. Then, with the help of the distributed observer, a novel containment control method is developed for each follower based on a time-varying scaling function, so that all followers can converge to the convex hull spanned by the states of multiple leaders within a prescribed time. The comparison with the finite-time and fixed-time control methods differs in that the convergence time of the method proposed in this paper is independent of the initial conditions and control parameters and can be arbitrarily preassigned according to actual needs. Finally, an example is given to demonstrate the usefulness of the prescribed-time containment control method.

Data-Driven Tracking Control for Multi-Agent Systems With Unknown Dynamics via Multithreading Iterative Q-Learning

This article addresses the tracking control problem of multiagent systems (MASs) with unknown dynamics. First, by designing a compensator, an augmented neighborhood error system is proposed. Then, a multithreading iterative <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -learning algorithm is developed, which can transform the tracking control problem into the optimal regulation of the augmented error system. In this algorithm, the agent controller is multithread, which consists of thread unit, global unit, and replay buffer. The thread unit is used to create the thread to collect the transitions with different control policies, which can reduce data relativity and improve data collection speed and exploration capability. The replay buffer is used to store the generated transitions. The global unit is used to generate the control policy. Moreover, the convergence analysis of the proposed algorithm is given, which shows that the neighborhood error converges to zero and the tracking control problem can be solved. Finally, the numerical example not only verifies the effectiveness of the obtained results but also shows the proposed algorithm performs better than the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -iterative algorithm.