Distributed cooperative stabilisation of continuous-time uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems

This paper addresses the distributed cooperative stabilisation problem of continuous-time uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems. By approximating the uncertain dynamics using neural networks, a distributed adaptive cooperative controller, based on the state information of the neighbouring agents, is proposed. The control design is developed for any undirected connected communication topologies without requiring the accurate model of each agent. This result is further extended to the output feedback case. An observer-based distributed cooperative controller is devised and a parameter dependent Riccati inequality is employed to prove stability of the overall multi-agent systems. This design is less complex than the other design methods and has a favourable decouple property between the observer design and the controller design for uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems. For both cases, the developed controllers guarantee that all signals in the closed-loop network are uniformly ultimately bounded, and the states of all agents cooperatively converge to a small neighbourhood of origin. A comparative study is given to show the efficacy of the proposed method.