Plenary lecture 3: cooperated output regulation of multi-agent systems: theory and applications
Jie Huang · International Conference on Signal Processing · 2011
Output regulation has been one of the central problems in control theory and applications for a few decades. This problem not only needs to guarantee the stability of the closed-loop system, but also enable the output of the closed-loop system to asymptotically track a class of reference inputs and reject a class of disturbances. Thus this problem is more challenging than the stabilization problem. This problem can precisely formulate many complex control problems such as the vibration suppression of high speed trains, vertical take-off and landing of airplanes in a carrier, and robot control and manipulation, and is thus of practical interests. So far the output regulation problem is mainly studied via a centralized control approach. As the world becomes more and more interconnected, more and more practical control problems such as the coordination of a group of mobile robots, and the formation of a group of unmanned flight vehicles must be described by a multi-agent system. Therefore, in this talk, we will describe a framework for handling the output regulation problem for a multi-agent system. The core of this framework includes the establishment of the concepts of the distributed observer, and the distributed internal model. On one hand, we will show that this framework will set a stage for solving the asymptotic tracking and disturbance rejection problem in an uncertain multi-agent system via a distributed control approach. On the other hand, we will show that this framework contains many control problems of multi-agent systems such as consensus, synchronization, and formation as special cases, thus leading to a unified solution to several different control problems of multi-agent systems.