Cooperative output regulation of heterogeneous multi-agent systems based on passivity

This paper investigates the problem of cooperative output regulation of heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems. A passive framework is presented for the stabilisation analysis of cooperative output regulation, which can overcome the difficulty caused by the fact that the global dynamics of heterogeneous multi-agent systems depends on the global communication structure. An adaptive distributed observer is proposed to estimate the state of the exosystem, and the proposed distributed observer is independent of any global information of the communication graph. Based on passivity design and adaptive distributed observer, both a distributed state feedback and a distributed output feedback protocol are designed for output synchronisation of heterogeneous multi-agent systems. The gain matrices of the distributed protocols and observers are obtained by a Riccati equation design approach. Furthermore, sufficient local conditions for solving the problem of cooperative output regulation of heterogeneous multi-agent systems are presented. Finally, numerical simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed control schemes.