Cooperative Control of Networked Multiple Dynamical Systems with Unbounded Transmission Delays and Its Application

Description

Cooperative control of networked multiple dynamical systems has become a topic of focus in the control community in recent years. This is mainly due to its broad applications in many areas including multiple spacecraft vehicles, biological systems, networked multiple mobile robots, teams of unmanned aerial vehicles, sensor networks and so on. Networked multiple dynamical systems are often referred to as multi-agent systems. The problems commonly addressed for networked multiple dynamical systems or multi-agent systems include consensus, cooperative output regulation, rendezvous, formation and so on. On the other hand, practical systems are often subject to variety of time delays, which can be typically classified as bounded or unbounded, and they are often the main cause of poor performance or even instability of the concerned systems. Multi-agent systems are no exception and often subject to various time delays, in particular, transmission delays between agents during their communication. Cooperative control of multi-agent systems with time delays has received considerable attention and many results have been reported in the past years. However, most of those results focus on only bounded delays, while unbounded delays are considered only for very simple agent dynamics such as integrators or homogeneous linear systems with some very restrictive assumptions, and for fixed transmission topologies. The recent literature review reveals that cooperative control of multi-agent systems with unbounded time delays is in its very early stage of development and many critical issues remain to be addressed. The issues include (i) how to deal with more general heterogeneous agent dynamics, (ii) how to deal with system uncertainties, and (iii) how to tackle more general time-varying transmission topologies. The successful addressing of these issues would greatly expand the range of applications of relevant theories and methodologies developed for cooperative control of multi-agent systems subject to unbounded delays as practical multi-agent systems are often heterogeneous, often of various uncertainties, and often subject to switching transmission topologies. This project will investigate and develop novel theories and methodologies for cooperative control of more general multi-agent systems with unbounded transmission delays, and in particular with heterogeneous agent dynamics, system uncertainties, and/or switching topologies. The outcomes of this project are expected to enrich the theoretical foundation and to provide more solid analysis and synthesis tools in cooperative control of networked multiple dynamical systems with unbounded transmission delays.