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arXiv · 2006.05799

A Separation-Based Methodology to Consensus Tracking of Switched High-Order Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems

Maolong Lv·Wenwu Yu·Jinde Cao·Simone Baldi
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Abstract

This work investigates a reduced-complexity adaptive methodology to consensus tracking for a team of uncertain high-order nonlinear systems with switched (possibly asynchronous) dynamics. It is well known that high-order nonlinear systems are intrinsically challenging as feedback linearization and backstepping methods successfully developed for low-order systems fail to work. At the same time, even the adding-one power-integrator methodology, well explored for the single-agent high-order case, presents some complexity issues and is unsuited for distributed control. At the core of the proposed distributed methodology is a newly proposed definition for separable functions: this definition allows the formulation of a separation-based lemma to handle the high-order terms with reduced complexity in the control design. Complexity is reduced in a twofold sense: the control gain of each virtual control law does not have to be incorporated in the next virtual control law iteratively, thus leading to a simpler expression of the control laws; the order of the virtual control gains increases only proportionally (rather than exponentially) with the order of the systems, dramatically reducing high-gain issues.

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Maolong Lv, Wenwu Yu, Jinde Cao, Simone Baldi. 2020-06-10. A Separation-Based Methodology to Consensus Tracking of Switched High-Order Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems. https://doi.org/10.1109/tnnls.2021.3070824

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