Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

The cooperative control of multi-agent systems includes but is not limited to such problems as consensus/synchronization, formation, rendezvous, and flocking. These problems arise from such applications as the coordination of mobile robots, mobile sensor networks, formation of unmanned flight vehicles, etc.  The past decade has witnessed a tremendous expansion on the research of multi-agent control systems. Starting from studying simple linear homogeneous systems under static network topology, the research has now progressed to address complex nonlinear heterogeneous uncertain systems subject to external disturbances and switched network topology. In this talk, we will present a unified framework called cooperative output regulation of multi-agent systems. The framework includes two approaches, i.e., the distributed observer approach and the distributed internal model approach. These two approaches can be viewed as the distributed counterparts of the feedforward control approach to handling the classical output regulation problem, and, respectively, the celebrated internal model principle for handling the robust output regulation problem. A direct application of this framework will lead to the solution of the leader-following consensus problem for uncertain multi-agent systems subject to switched network topology. The two approaches can also be applied to some other cooperative control problems of multi-agent systems such as formation, flocking, and rendezvous.