Event‐triggered output synchronization of heterogeneous multi‐agent systems

This paper proposes a control architecture that employs event‐triggered control techniques to achieve output synchronization of a group of heterogeneous linear time‐invariant agents. We associate with each agent an event‐triggered output regulation controller and an event‐triggered reference generator. The event‐triggered output regulation controller is designed such that the regulated output of the agent approximately tracks a reference signal provided by the reference generator in the presence of unknown disturbances. The event‐triggered reference generator is responsible for synchronizing its internal state across all agents by exchanging information through a communication network linking the agents. We first address the output regulation problem for a single agent where we analyze two event‐triggered scenarios. In the first one, the output and input event detectors operate synchronously, meaning that resets are made at the same time instants, while in the second one, they operate asynchronously and independently of each other. It is shown that the tracking error is globally bounded for all bounded reference trajectories and all bounded disturbances. We then merge the results on event‐triggered output regulation with previous results on event‐triggered communication protocols for synchronization of the reference generators to demonstrate that the regulated output of each agent converges to and remains in a neighborhood of the desired reference trajectory and that the closed‐loop system does not exhibit Zeno solutions. Several examples are provided to illustrate the advantages and issues of every component of the proposed control architecture. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fixed‐Time Synchronization of a Class of Second‐Order Nonlinear Leader‐Following Multi‐Agent Systems

The fixed‐time synchronization problem for a class of second‐order nonlinear multi‐agent systems with a leader‐follower architecture is investigated in this paper. To achieve the fixed‐time tracking task, the design procedure is divided into two steps. At the first step, a distributed fixed‐time observer is designed for each agent to estimate the leader's state in a fixed time. Then, at the second step, based on the technique of adding a power integrator, a fixed‐time tracking controller for each agent is proposed such that the estimate leader's state can be tracked in a fixed time. Finally, an observer‐based fixed‐time controller is developed such that the leader can be tracked by all the followers in a fixed time, which can be predetermined. Simulations are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Variable Structure Predefined‐Time Stabilization of Second‐Order Systems

A controller that stabilizes second‐order vector systems in predefined‐time is introduced in this paper. That is, for second‐order systems a controller is designed such that the trajectories reach the origin in a time defined in advance. The proposed controller is a variable structure controller that first drive the system trajectories to a linear manifold in predefined time and then drives the system trajectories to a non‐smooth manifold with the predefined‐time stability property, in predefined time also; this is done in order to avoid the differentiability problem that inherently appears when stabilizing high‐order systems in finite time under the block control principle technique. The proposal is applied to the predefined‐time exact tracking of fully actuated mechanical systems. As an example, the proposed solution is applied to a two‐link planar manipulator, and numerical simulations are conducted to show its performance.     

Distributed consensus control for multi‐agent systems using terminal sliding mode and Chebyshev neural networks

This paper investigates the problem of consensus tracking control for second‐order multi‐agent systems in the presence of uncertain dynamics and bounded external disturbances. The communication ?ow among neighbor agents is described by an undirected connected graph. A fast terminal sliding manifold based on lumped state errors that include absolute and relative state errors is proposed, and then a distributed finite‐time consensus tracking controller is developed by using terminal sliding mode and Chebyshev neural networks. In the proposed control scheme, Chebyshev neural networks are used as universal approximators to learn unknown nonlinear functions in the agent dynamics online, and a robust control term using the hyperbolic tangent function is applied to counteract neural‐network approximation errors and external disturbances, which makes the proposed controller be continuous and hence chattering‐free. Meanwhile, a smooth projection algorithm is employed to guarantee that estimated parameters remain within some known bounded sets. Furthermore, the proposed control scheme for each agent only employs the information of its neighbor agents and guarantees a group of agents to track a time‐varying reference trajectory even when the reference signals are available to only a subset of the group members. Most importantly, finite‐time stability in both the reaching phase and the sliding phase is guaranteed by a Lyapunov‐based approach. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed controller and show that the proposed controller exceeds to a linear hyperplane‐based sliding mode controller. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Consensus of multi‐agent systems with time‐varying topology: An event‐based dynamic feedback scheme

The event‐based control strategy is an effective methodology for reducing the controller update and communication over the network. In this paper, the event‐based consensus of multi‐agent systems with linear dynamics and time‐varying topology is studied. For each agent, a state‐dependent threshold with an exponentially decaying bound is presented to determine the event times, and a new event‐based dynamic feedback scheme is proposed. It is shown that the controller update for each agent is only dependent on its own event times, which reduces significantly the controller update or computation for each agent. Moreover, based on the event‐based dynamic feedback scheme and the event triggering function presented in this paper, the continuous communication among neighboring agents is avoided, and the Zeno‐behavior of the closed‐loop systems is excluded. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of theoretical results. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robust output tracking control for a velocity‐sensorless vertical take‐off and landing aircraft with input disturbances and unmatched uncertainties

In this paper, we develop a nonlinear controller to achieve output tracking for a nonminimum phase vertical take‐off and landing aircraft without velocity measurements. To attenuate the effects of input disturbances and unmatched uncertainties, auxiliary control inputs are introduced in the state observer. Then by taking the aircraft lateral movement into consideration, a control law is proposed to force the vertical take‐off and landing aircraft to asymptotically track the desired trajectories even in the presence of unexpected changes of the trajectories, while driving the unstable internal dynamics to follow the bounded and causal ideal internal dynamics via the stable system center method. Numerical simulation results illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Amplitude‐ and Rate‐Saturated Controller for Linear Plants

This paper proposes a new nonlinear controller applicable to single‐input linear systems under bounded disturbance. The controller provides control signals satisfying specified amplitude and rate‐of‐change limitations. This feature is realized by its sliding mode‐like structure comprising a set‐valued function. The controller also employs a state‐dependent parameter to broaden the region of attraction and to shrink the terminal attractor. In addition, this paper provides a discrete‐time implementation of the proposed controller based on a model‐based implicit discretization scheme. Numerical examples show the validity of the proposed controller.     

Distributed adaptive fault‐tolerant leader‐following formation control of nonlinear uncertain second‐order multi‐agent systems

This paper presents a distributed integrated fault diagnosis and accommodation scheme for leader‐following formation control of a class of nonlinear uncertain second‐order multi‐agent systems. The fault model under consideration includes both process and actuator faults, which may evolve abruptly or incipiently. The time‐varying leader communicates with a small subset of follower agents, and each follower agent communicates to its directly connected neighbors through a bidirectional network with possibly asymmetric weights. A local fault diagnosis and accommodation component are designed for each agent in the distributed system, which consists of a fault detection and isolation module and a reconfigurable controller module comprised of a baseline controller and two adaptive fault‐tolerant controllers, activated after fault detection and after fault isolation, respectively. By using appropriately the designed Lyapunov functions, the closed‐loop stability and asymptotic convergence properties of the leader‐follower formation are rigorously established under different modes of the fault‐tolerant control system.     

Sliding mode control of discrete‐time switched systems subject to mode delays

This work considers the sliding mode control problem of a class of discrete‐time uncertain switched systems subject to detecting‐delay on mode signals, which may result in the asynchronous phenomenon between the controller and the switched system. Since the mode information of the controlled system is not available for the controller in time, a mode‐independent sliding surface will be introduced, by which an asynchronous sliding mode controller is designed, whose control gain and robust parameter will be changing according to the controller mode. In the analysis on the stability of the closed‐loop control system and the reachability of the specified sliding surface, the asynchronous characteristics are detailedly investigated. It is shown that the Lyapunov function may be not always decreasing along the state trajectories during the unmatched interval of controller modes and system modes. Nevertheless, it is proven that the state trajectories can be driven into a sliding region around the specified sliding surface in finite time. Finally, some numerical simulation results are provided.     

Control of discrete‐time periodic linear systems with input saturation via multi‐step periodic invariant sets

This paper studies local control of discrete‐time periodic linear systems subject to input saturation by using the multi‐step periodic invariant set approach. A multi‐step periodic invariant set refers to a set from which all trajectories will enter a periodic invariant set after finite steps, remain there forever, and eventually converge to the origin as time approaches infinity. The problems of (robust) estimation of the domain of attraction, (robust) local stabilization (with bounded uncertainties), and disturbance rejection are considered. Compared with the conventional periodic invariant set approach, which has been used in the literature for local stability analysis and stabilization of discrete‐time periodic linear systems subject to input saturation, this new invariant set approach is capable of significantly reducing the conservatism by introducing additional auxiliary variables in the set invariance conditions. Moreover, the new approach allows to design (robust) stabilizing periodic controller, in the presence of norm bounded uncertainties, whose period is the same as the open‐loop system and is different from the existing periodic enhancement approach by which the period of the controller is multiple times of the period of the open‐loop system. Several numerical examples are worked out to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distributed event‐triggered feedback consensus control with state‐dependent threshold for general linear multi‐agent systems

This paper considers the distributed event‐triggered consensus problem for multi‐agent systems with general linear dynamics under undirected graphs. Based on state feedback, we propose a novel distributed event‐triggered consensus controller with state‐dependent threshold for each agent to achieve consensus, without continuous communication in either controller update or triggering condition monitoring. Each agent only needs to monitor its own state continuously to determine if the event is triggered. It is proved that there is no Zeno behavior under the proposed consensus control algorithm. To relax the requirement of the state measurement of each agent, we further propose a novel distributed observer‐based event‐triggered consensus controller to solve the consensus problem in the case with output feedback and prove that there is no Zeno behavior exhibited. Finally, simulation results are given to illustrate the theoretical results. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cooperative robust output regulation problem for discrete‐time linear time‐delay multi‐agent systems

In this paper, we study the cooperative robust output regulation problem for discrete‐time linear multi‐agent systems with both communication and input delays by a distributed internal model approach. We first introduce the distributed internal model for discrete‐time multi‐agent systems with both communication and input delays. Then, we define the so‐called auxiliary system and auxiliary augmented system. Finally, we solve our problem by showing, under some standard assumptions, that if a distributed state feedback control or a distributed output feedback control solves the robust output regulation problem of the auxiliary system, then the same control law solves the cooperative robust output regulation problem of the original multi‐agent systems.     

Resilient H∞ Control Design for Discrete‐Time Uncertain Linear Systems: An Auxiliary System Transformation Approach

This paper studies the resilient (non‐fragile) H∞ output‐feedback control design for discrete‐time uncertain linear systems with controller uncertainty. The design considers parametric norm‐bounded uncertainty in all state‐space matrices of the system, output and controller equations. The paper shows that the resilient H∞ output‐feedback control problem is equivalent to a scaled H∞ output‐feedback control problem of an auxiliary system without any system or controller uncertainty. Using the existing optimal H∞ design to solve the auxiliary system, the design guarantees that the resultant closed‐loop systems are quadratically stable with disturbance attenuation γ for all admissible system and controller uncertainties. A numerical example is given to illustrate the design method and its benefits.     

Modeling and quadratic stabilization of a class of linear uncertain time‐varying systems

This paper considers the quadratic stabilization of a class of uncertain linear time‐varying (LTV) continuous‐time plants. The state‐space representation of each plant is based on the physically meaningful assumption of a dynamical matrix containing uncertain elements whose time trajectories are sufficiently smooth to be well described by interval polynomial functions with arbitrarily time varying coefficients. At some isolated time instants, the parameters trajectories can exhibit some first‐kind discontinuities due for example to sharply varying operating conditions. Using a parameter independent Lyapunov function, a quadratically stabilizing dynamic output controller is directly obtained by the solution of some LMIs. A salient feature of the paper is that, unlike all the other existing methods, quadratic stabilization can be achieved over possibly arbitrarily large uncertain domains of parameters. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robust quantized output feedback control for uncertain discrete time‐delay systems with saturation nonlinearity

This paper is concerned with robust quantized output feedback control problems for uncertain discrete‐time systems with time‐varying delay and saturation nonlinearity. It is assumed that the quantizer is of the saturating type. A new framework for the local boundedness stabilization of quantized feedback systems is developed. Attention is focused on finding a quantized static output feedback controller such that all trajectories of the resulting closed‐loop system starting from an admissible initial basin converge to a bounded region strictly within the initial basin. A quantized feedback controller is proposed, which comprises output feedback and the exogenous signal parts. Simulation examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness and advantage of the proposed methods. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A robust constrained control approach for flexible air‐breathing hypersonic vehicles

This article investigates the robust adaptive control system design for the longitudinal dynamics of a flexible air‐breathing hypersonic vehicle (FAHV) subject to parametric uncertainties and control input constraints. A combination of back‐stepping and nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) is utilized for exploiting an adaptive output‐feedback controller to provide robust tracking of velocity and altitude reference trajectories in the presence of flexible effects and system uncertainties. The dynamic surface control is introduced to solve the problem of “explosion of terms.” A new NDO is developed to guarantee the proposed controller's disturbance attenuation ability and to performance robustness against uncertain aerodynamic coefficients. To deal with the problem of actuator saturation, a novel auxiliary system is exploited to compensate the desired control laws. The stability of the presented NDO and controller is analyzed. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented control strategy.     

Distributed Adaptive Event‐Triggered Control for Leader‐Following Consensus of Multi‐Agent Systems

This paper studies the leader‐following consensus problem for Lipschitz nonlinear multi‐agent systems using novel event‐triggered controllers. A distributed adaptive law is introduced for the event‐based control strategy design such that the proposed controllers are independent of system parameters and only use the relative states of neighboring agents, and hence are fully distributed. Due to the introduction of an event‐triggered control scheme, the controller of the agent is only triggered at it's own event times, and thus reduces the amount of communication between controller and actuator and lowers the frequency of controller updates in practice. Based on a quadratic Lyapunov function, the event condition which uses only neighbor information and local computation at trigger instants is established. Infinite triggers within a finite time are also verified to be impossible. The effectiveness of the theoretical results are illustrated through simulation examples.     

Distributed event‐triggered consensus control with fully continuous communication free for general linear multi‐agent systems under directed graph

This paper considers the distributed event‐triggered consensus problem for multi‐agent systems with general linear dynamics under a directed graph. We propose a novel distributed event‐triggered consensus controller with state‐dependent threshold for each agent to achieve consensus. In this strategy, continuous communication in both controller update and triggering condition monitoring is not required, which means the proposed strategy is fully continuous communication free. Each agent only needs to monitor its own state continuously to determine if the event is triggered. Additionally, the approach shown here provides consensus with guaranteed positive inter‐event time intervals. Therefore, there is no Zeno behavior under the proposed consensus control algorithm. Finally, numerical simulations are given to illustrate the theoretical results.     

Mixed‐Objective Robust Dynamic Output Feedback Controller Synthesis for Continuous‐Time Polytopic Lpv Systems

A robust dynamic output feedback controller synthesis algorithm considering H_∞/H₂ performance and regional pole placement is addressed for a nonlinear system with parameter uncertainties and external disturbance. First, the formulation of a gain‐scheduled mixed‐objective robust dynamic output feedback controller for continuous‐time polytopic linear parameter varying (LPV) systems is presented. To reduce conservativeness, some auxiliary slack variables and parameter‐dependent Lyapunov functions are employed in addition to well‐established performance conditions. Then, sufficient conditions for the desired gain‐scheduled mixed‐objective robust dynamic output feedback controllers are cast into an efficiently tractable finite‐dimensional convex optimization problem in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Finally, numerical simulation shows the validity of the proposed controller, which has good stability, strong robustness, satisfied disturbance attenuation ability, and smooth dynamic properties.     

Invariant‐set‐based fault diagnosis in Lure systems

In this paper, we present an invariant‐set‐based method for actuator and sensor fault detection and isolation in Lure systems. The Lure plant is controlled by an observer‐based feedback tracking controller, designed for the nominal (fault‐free) system. Suitable residual signals are constructed from measurable system outputs and estimates associated with the nominal observer. Faults are diagnosed by online contrasting the residual signal trajectories against sets of values that the residuals are shown to attain under healthy or faulty operation. These values are obtained via set‐invariance analysis of the system closed‐loop trajectories. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.