Cooperative output regulation of multi-agent systems with switched leader dynamics

In this paper, the cooperative output regulation problem for heterogeneous multi-agent systems is addressed by considering a switched leader dynamics. The switched leader dynamics consists of multiple linear models and a switching rule governing the switches among them. A switched leader is capable of generating various sophisticated reference signals for more complicated multi-agent coordination tasks. A novel distributed hybrid impulsive switching control scheme is proposed to achieve cooperative output regulation. Distributed switching stability is established using the average dwell-time technique with multiple Lyapunov functions. Moreover, the associated distributed control synthesis conditions are formulated in terms of linear matrix inequalities plus linear matrix equations. As a result, both switching rules for the leader and distributed switching protocols for the followers can be jointly synthesised via efficient semi-definite programming. An example has been used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.