This paper studies cooperative tracking problem of heterogeneous Euler-Lagrange systems with an uncertain leader. Different from most existing works, system dynamic knowledge of the leader node is unaccessible to any follower node in our paper. Distributed adaptive observers are designed for all follower nodes, simultaneously estimate the state and parameters of the leader node. The observer design does not rely on the frequency knowledge of the leader node, and the estimation errors are shown to converge to zero exponentially. Moreover, the results are applied to general directed graphs, where the symmetry of Laplacian matrix does not hold. This is due to two newly developed Lyapunov equations, which solely depend on communication network topologies. Interestingly, using these Lyapunov equations, many results of multi-agent systems over undirected graphs can be extended to general directed graphs. Finally, this paper also advances the knowledge base of adaptive control systems by providing a main tool in the analysis of parameter convergence for adaptive observers.
We study cooperative output feedback tracking control of stochastic linear heterogeneous leader-following multi-agent systems. Each agent has a continuous-time linear heterogeneous dynamics with incompletely measurable state, and there are additive and multiplicative noises along with information exchange among agents. We propose a set of admissible distributed observation strategies for estimating the leader's and the followers' states, and a set of admissible cooperative output feedback control strategies based on the certainty equivalence principle. By output regulation theory and stochasti…
A leader-follower system is developed for cooperative transportation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that inter-UAV communication is not required and the reference trajectory of the payload can be modified in real time, so that it can be applied to a dynamically changing environment. To track the modified reference trajectory in real time under the communication-free condition, the leader-follower system is considered as a nonholonomic system in which a controller is developed for the leader to achieve asymptotic tracking of the payload. To eliminate the need to install f…
We propose predefined-time consensus-based cooperative guidance laws for a swarm of interceptors to simultaneously capture a target capable of executing various kinds of motions. Unlike leader-follower cooperative guidance techniques, the swarm of interceptors has no leader and each interceptor executes its own guidance command in a distributive fashion, thus obviating the residency of the mission over a single interceptor. We first design cooperative guidance commands subject to target's mobility, followed by the same when the target is stationary, and also account for interceptors' changing …
The unknown sharp changes of vehicle acceleration rates, also called the unknown jerk dynamics, may significantly affect the driving performance of the leader vehicle in a platoon, resulting in more drastic car-following movements in platooning tracking control, which could cause safety and traffic capacity concerns. To address these issues, in this paper, we investigate cooperative platooning tracking control and intermittent optimization problems for connected automated vehicles (CAVs) with a nonlinear car-following model. We assume that the external inputs of the leader CAV contain unknown …
In this paper, we study the leader-following consensus problem of multiple Euler-Lagrange systems subject to an uncertain leader system. We first establish an adaptive distributed observer for a neutrally stable linear leader system whose system matrix is not known exactly. Under standard assumptions, this adaptive distributed observer can estimate and pass the leader's state to each follower through the communication network of the system without knowing the leader's system matrix exactly. Under the additional assumption that the leader's state is persistently exciting, this adaptive distribu…
In this note, the problem of simultaneous leader-following consensus and parameter estimation is studied for a class of multi-agent systems subject to an uncertain leader system. The leader system is described by a sum of sinusoids with unknown amplitudes, frequencies and phases. A distributed adaptive observer is established for each agent to estimate the unknown frequencies of the leader. It is shown that if the signal of the leader is sufficiently rich, the estimation errors of the unknown frequencies converge to zero asymptotically for all the agents. Based on the designed distributed adap…
Cooperative Decentralized Multi-agent Control under Local LTL Tasks and Connectivity Constraints
ACCESS Linnaeus Center, School of Electrical Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（ACCESS林奈中心，电气工程学院，皇家理工学院）；KTH Centre for Autonomous Systems（KTH自主系统中心）
Connected automated vehicles (CAVs) have brought new opportunities to improve traffic throughput and reduce energy consumption. However, the uncertain lane-change behaviors (LCBs) of surrounding vehicles (SVs) as an uncontrollable factor significantly threaten the driving safety and the consistent movement of a group of platoon CAVs. How to ensure safe, efficient, and fuel economic platoon control poses a key challenge faced by researchers in complex traffic environments. This study proposes a dynamic platoon management and cooperative driving framework for a mixed traffic flow consisting of m…
This paper addresses a formation tracking problem for nonlinear multi-agent systems with time-varying actuator faults, in which only a subset of agents has access to the leader's information over the directed leader-follower network with a spanning tree. Both the amplitudes and signs of control coefficients induced by actuator faults are unknown and time-varying. The aforementioned setting improves the practical relevance of the problem to be investigated, and meanwhile, it poses technical challenges to distributed controller design and asymptotic stability analysis. By introducing a distribut…
This paper develops a distributed solution to the fully-heterogeneous containment control problem (CCP), for which not only the followers' dynamics but also the leaders' dynamics are non-identical. A novel formulation of the fully-heterogeneous CCP is first presented in which each follower constructs its virtual exo-system. To build these virtual exo-systems by followers, a novel distributed algorithm is developed to calculate the so-called normalized level of influences (NLIs) of all leaders on each follower and a novel adaptive distributed observer is designed to estimate the dynamics and st…
Similarity Decomposition Approach to Oscillatory Synchronization for Multiple Mechanical Systems With a Virtual Leader
Beijing Institute of Control Engineering（北京控制工程研究所）；Science and Technology on Space Intelligent Control Laboratory, Beijing Institute of Control Engineering（北京控制工程研究所空间智能控制技术实验室）
This paper studies a leader-follower formation tracking problem where the leaders are moving at the same unknown bounded velocity. A distance-based control law is proposed for follower agents to maintain the desired distances in the formation and move at the leaders' velocity. The control law consists of a component to handle the uncertainty of the leaders' velocity and a component to achieve the desired distances in finite time. Numerical simulations are also provided to support the theoretical results.
The continuum deformation leader-follower cooperative control strategy models vehicles in a multi-agent system as particles of a deformable body. A desired continuum deformation is defined based on leaders' trajectories and acquired by followers in real-time through local communication. The existing continuum deformation theory requires followers to be placed inside the convex simplex defined by leaders. This constraint is relaxed in this paper. We prove that under suitable assumptions any (n+1)(n=1,2,3) vehicles forming an n-D simplex can be selected as leaders while followers, arbitrarily po…
Guaranteed Cost Tracking for Uncertain Coupled Multi-agent Systems Using Consensus over a Directed Graph
The University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy（澳大利亚国防军学院新南威尔士大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）
Continuum deformation is a leader-follower multiagent cooperative control approach. Previous work showed a desired continuum deformation can be uniquely defined based on trajectories of d +1 leaders in a d-dimensional motion space and acquired by followers through local inter-agent communication. This paper formally specifies continuum deformation coordination in an obstacle-laden environment. Using linear temporal logic (LTL), continuum deformation liveness and safety requirements are defined. Safety is prescribed by providing conditions on (i) agent deviation bound, (ii) inter-agent collisio…
Queen’s University（女王大学）；Louisiana State University（路易斯安那州立大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）
Knowledge-based leader-following synchronization of heterogeneous nonlinear multi-agent systems is a challenging problem since the leader's dynamic information is unknown to any follower node. This paper proposes a learning-based fully distributed observer for a class of nonlinear leader systems, which can simultaneously learn the leader's dynamics and states. This class of leader dynamics is rather general and does not require a bounded Jacobian matrix. Based on this learning-based distributed observer, we further synthesize an adaptive distributed control law for solving the leader-following…
We are concerned with finding Nash Equilibria in agent-based multi-cluster games, where agents are separated into distinct clusters. While the agents inside each cluster collaborate to achieve a common goal, the clusters are considered to be virtual players that compete against each other in a non-cooperative game with respect to a coupled cost function. In such scenarios, the inner-cluster problem and the game between the clusters need to be solved simultaneously. Therefore, the resulting inter-cluster Nash Equilibrium should also be a minimizer of the social welfare problem inside the cluste…
In bipartite consensus tracking (BCT) tasks for nonlinear multiagent systems, stochastic disturbances and actuator faults are regarded as essential factors that hamper effective controller formulation and tracking precision improvement. To address these difficulties, we design an improved finitetime performance function (FTPF) for a fuzzy fault-tolerant distributed cooperative control scheme to achieve finite-time robust precision BCT tasks for nonlinear multiagent systems. The parameter selection range of the improved FTPF is relaxed, which renders systems to achieve better transient performa…
In this paper, we present a distributed optimal multiagent control scheme for quadrotor formation tracking under localization errors. Our control architecture is based on a leader-follower approach, where a single leader quadrotor tracks a desired trajectory while the followers maintain their relative positions in a triangular formation. We begin by modeling the quadrotors as particles in the YZ-plane evolving under dynamics with uncertain state information. Next, by formulating the formation tracking task as an optimization problem -- with a constraint-augmented Lagrangian subject to dynamic …
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science（电气工程与计算机科学学院）
Control and planning of multi-agent systems is an active and increasingly studied topic of research, with many practical applications such as rescue missions, security, surveillance, and transportation. This thesis addresses the planning and control of multi-agent systems under temporal logic tasks. The considered systems concern complex, robotic, manipulator-endowed systems, which can coordinate in order to execute complicated tasks, including object manipulation/transportation. Motivated by real-life scenarios, we take into account high-order dynamics subject to model uncertainties and unkno…
In this paper, we study the leaderless consensus problem for multiple Lagrangian systems in the presence of parametric uncertainties and external disturbances under directed graphs. For achieving asymptotic behavior, a robust continuous term with adaptive varying gains is added to alleviate the effects of the external disturbances with unknown bounds. In the case of a fixed directed graph, by introducing an integrate term in the auxiliary variable design, the final consensus equilibrium can be explicitly derived. We show that the agents achieve weighted average consensus, where the final equil…
We study platoon control of vehicles with linear third-order longitudinal dynamics under the constant time headway policy. The controller of each follower vehicle is only based on its own velocity, acceleration, inter-vehicle distance and velocity difference with respect to its immediate predecessor, which are all obtained by on-board sensors. We develop distributed cooperative extended state observers for followers to estimate the acceleration differences between adjacent vehicles. Based on estimates of the acceleration differences, distributed cooperative control laws are designed. By using …
Cooperative Target Capture in 3D Engagements over Switched Dynamic Graphs
Guidance, Autonomy, Learning, and Control for Intelligent Systems (GALACxIS) Lab, Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of Cincinnati（智能系统指导、自主、学习与控制实验室，航空航天工程与工程力学系，辛辛那提大学）；Intelligent Systems & Control (ISaC) Lab, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（智能系统与控制实验室，航空航天工程系，印度班加罗尔理工学院）
The flock-guidance problem enjoys a challenging structure where multiple optimization objectives are solved simultaneously. This usually necessitates different control approaches to tackle various objectives, such as guidance, collision avoidance, and cohesion. The guidance schemes, in particular, have long suffered from complex tracking-error dynamics. Furthermore, techniques that are based on linear feedback strategies obtained at equilibrium conditions either may not hold or degrade when applied to uncertain dynamic environments. Pre-tuned fuzzy inference architectures lack robustness under…
