Observer‐based consensus control for heterogeneous multi‐agent systems with intermittent communications

Abstract

In this article, the output consensus tracking problem for a class of heterogeneous multiagent systems (HMASs) with intermittent communications is studied. We first design a local observer for each agent to estimate unmeasurable state information of followers', and an adaptive distributed estimator is constructed for each follower to estimate the leader's state. Then a type of switched and distributed tracking controllers for HMASs are established under the intermittent communications, and relative parameters of the novel controllers are designed via the constructed regulation equation. Furthermore, by using the switching system theory and LMI technology, both the sufficient conditions for HMASs to achieve output consensus tracking and the threshold of communication rate are obtained, and simultaneously the controller gain and observer gain matrices are constructed. Finally, a simulation example is provided for general HMASs to verify the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Prescribed-time leader-following consensus and containment control for second-order multiagent systems with only position measurements

“…To deal with the issue of unavailability of some state information in consensus problems of MASs with a leader-follower configuration, a common method is to introduce observers to estimate the unmeasurable state information. Local observers were designed by Zhang et al (2021) to estimate the unmeasurable states of followers for heterogeneous MASs. Researchers also proposed other kinds of observers to estimate the unknown states of the leader or directly estimate the state tracking errors of each follower.…”