Observer-Based Coordinated Tracking Control for Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems with Intermittent Communication under Heterogeneous Coupling Framework

TL;DR

This paper develops an observer-based control strategy for nonlinear multi-agent systems with intermittent communication, employing heterogeneous coupling and dynamic topology to ensure stable coordinated tracking.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed control protocol with adjustable coupling parameters and a new lemma for cooperative design, handling various communication interruption scenarios.

Findings

System stability is proven under the proposed control scheme.

The control method effectively manages different communication interruption cases.

Simulation results verify the approach's effectiveness for nonlinear MASs.

Abstract

In this article, the observer-based coordinated tracking control problem for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems(MASs) with intermittent communication and information constraints is studied under dynamic switching topology. First, a state observer is designed to estimate the unmeasurable actual state information in the system. Second, adjustable heterogeneous coupling weighting parameters are introduced in the dynamic switching topology, and the distributed coordinated tracking control protocol under heterogeneous coupling framework is proposed. Then, a new Lemma is constructed to realize the cooperative design of observer gain, state feedback gain and heterogeneous coupling gain matrices. Furthermore, the stability of the system is further proved, and the range of communication rate is obtained. On this basis, the intermittent communication mode is extended to three time interval cases, namely normal communication, leader-follower communication interruption and all agents communication interruption, and then the distributed coordinated tracking control method is improved to solve this problem. Finally, simulation experiments are conducted with nonlinear MASs to verify the correctness of methods.