Synchronization of multi-agent systems with heterogeneous controllers

Abstract

This paper studies the synchronization of a multiagent system where the agents are coupled through heterogeneous controller gains. Synchronization refers to the situation where all the agents in a group have a common velocity direction. We generalize existing results and show that by using heterogeneous controller gains, the final velocity direction at which the system of agents synchronize can be controlled. The effect of heterogeneous gains on the reachable set of this final velocity direction is further analyzed. We also show that for realistic systems, a limited control force to stabilize the agents to the synchronized condition can be achieved by confining these heterogeneous controller gains to an upper bound. Simulations are given to support the theoretical findings.

Multi‐vehicle formation in a controllable force field with non‐identical controller gains

“…The issue of collision avoidance among vehicles is not considered in this paper. Remark 1 Note that (1) represents the unicycle model of an agent and is widely studied in the literature [14, 25, 26, 32, 33]. In fact, this is a simplified kinematic model of a practical vehicle on a two‐dimensional plane, which could be a ground or aerial vehicle operating at a constant height [9, 10].…”

“…Notice that the heterogeneous gains are not unique in order to obtain a desired reference direction . However, we can bound them by an upper value suitable for certain practical applications [14]. Example 3 In this example, we consider three vehicles whose initial positions and heading angles are given by We want to stabilise BCF of these three vehicles about a prescribed location of their centroid at along with the desired reference direction at .…”

Robust model‐free adaptive iterative learning formation for unknown heterogeneous non‐linear multi‐agent systems

“…Until now, a great number of approaches have been used to design the MASs formation protocols considering different agent dynamics or communication structures [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. The linear state feedback protocols are proposed for linear agents with fixed and switching communication topology in [5,6], respectively.…”

“…In [9], the neural network-based adaptive formation control scheme is designed for a class of non-linear MASs considering collision avoidance. As a practical application, the formation problem of unicycle agents is investigated in [10][11][12], where the heterogeneity in both controller gains and speeds is considered. For a more detailed review of these protocols before 2013, readers are referred to [13].…”

Collective circular motion in synchronized and balanced formations with second-order rotational dynamics

“…Recently, the effect of heterogeneity in various aspects have been studied in the literature. For example, [8] considers nonidentical linear velocities of the agents, and [9] considers heterogeneous control gains. In a similar spirit, in this paper, we consider that the angular velocities of the initial rotational motion of the agents are nonidentical and are allowed to vary with time.…”