Robust Cooperative Output Regulation of Heterogeneous Uncertain Linear Multiagent Systems with Unbounded Distributed Transmission Delays

This article studies the robust cooperative output regulation problem of heterogeneous uncertain linear multiagent systems under unbounded distributed transmission delays. A novel distributed observer is first proposed to estimate the state of an exosystem in the presence of unbounded distributed transmission delays. Then, two novel distributed controllers, one based on state feedback and the other based on output feedback, are further developed without any prior knowledge of the unbounded transmission delays. It is shown that the resulting closed-loop multiagent systems can achieve robust cooperative output regulation. It is also shown that the better transient performance is achieved with our proposed controllers in contrast to many existing low-gain controllers, which are proposed to deal with both bounded and unbounded transmission delays. Our results can be directly applied to solve cooperative output regulation problems of multiagent systems with bounded distributed or constant transmission delays. Furthermore, our results can also be directly applied to solve leader–following consensus problems of multiagent systems with unbounded distributed, bounded distributed, or constant transmission delays. Finally, a simulation example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.