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Cooperative Control of Leader-follower Multi-agent Systems under Transient Constraints

Time: Fri 2020-10-23 10.00

Location: Harry Nyquist Room, Malvinas väg 10, Stockholm (English)

Subject area: Electrical Engineering

Doctoral student: Fei Chen , Reglerteknik

Opponent: Associate Professor Stephan Trenn, University of Groningen

Supervisor: Professor Dimos V. Dimarogonas, Reglerteknik; Jana Tumova, Robotik, perception och lärande, RPL

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Abstract

Significant research has been devoted to the problem of distributed consensus or formation control of multi-agent systems in the last decades. These distributed control strategies are designed for all agents and sometimes it may be redundant and costly since the desired tasks may be fulfilled by steering part of the agents through the appropriately designed local control strategy while the other agents can just follow some standard distributed control protocol. Therefore, the leader-follower framework is considered in this thesis, which is meant in the sense that a group of agents with external inputs are selected as leaders in order to drive the group of followers in a way that the entire system can achieve consensus or target formation within certain transient bounds. The followers are only guided through their dynamic couplings with the steered leaders and without any additional control effort.

The first part of the thesis deals with consensus or formation control for leader-follower multi-agent systems in a distributed manner using a prescribed performance strategy. Both the first and second-order cases are treated. Under the assumption of tree graphs, a distributed control law is proposed for the first-order case when the decay rate of the performance functions is within a sufficient bound. Then, two classes of tree graphs that can have additional followers are investigated. For the second-order case, we propose a distributed control law based on a backstepping approach for the group of leaders to steer the entire system achieving the target formation within the prescribed performance bounds. In the second part, we further discuss the results for general graphs with cycles, which are extended based on the previous results of tree graphs. The extension of general graphs with cycles has more practical applications and offers a complete theory for undirected graphs. In the last part of the thesis, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the leader-follower graph topology in order to achieve the desired formation while satisfying the prescribed performance transient bounds. The results developed in this thesis are further verified by several simulation examples.

urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-283583