Distributed Event-Triggered Cooperative Control of Nonlinear Multiple Dynamic Systems and Its Applications

Distributed cooperative control of multiple dynamic systems, also called multi-agent systems (MASs), has been a central topic in the control and robotics community over the past two decades due to its great potential in real-world applications. Common application examples include search and rescue by a team of unmanned aerial vehicles and environmental monitoring by multi-robot systems. To achieve cooperative control, communication between agents is often needed for information exchange and continuous communication has been widely adopted. However, continuous communication often leads to excessive and unnecessary consumption of energy and communication resources. In real-world scenarios, such resources are always limited. Therefore, event-triggered control strategies have emerged as an effective solution to this issue. As a fundamental topic in the cooperative control of MASs, distributed cooperative robust output regulation of MASs has been widely studied via various control strategies including event-triggered control strategies. Nevertheless, most existing works on the cooperative robust control problems of MASs with event-triggered strategies still rely on continuous communication to monitor event-triggering conditions. In addition, communication between agents is often subject to communication delays and time-varying communication topologies, which are known to have an adverse impact on the performance of the concerned MASs, and even worse, to hinder the accomplishment of cooperative control tasks. Recent literature reveals that when communication delays and time-varying communication topologies are considered, the distributed cooperative robust output regulation of nonlinear MASs with event-triggered communication has not been well studied yet. This project will investigate the problems of cooperative robust output regulation for nonlinear MASs using event-triggered control in which not only the controller updates but also the communication between agents is triggered by events. The main challenges of these problems lie in the complexity of nonlinear agent dynamics, communication constraints, as well as the hybrid dynamics nature arising from the occurrence of events. This project will develop new distributed control strategies with both event-triggered communication and event-triggered control updates to solve the cooperative robust output regulation problem for a typical class of nonlinear MASs under communication delays and switching topologies. The anticipated outcomes of this project are expected to offer solutions to numerous fundamental and critical obstacles encountered in cooperative control problems. These solutions will greatly facilitate the practical application of cooperative control in real-world scenarios.