Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems

Task complexity, communication constraints, flexibility and energy-saving concerns are all factors that may require a group of autonomous agents to work together in a cooperative manner. Applications involving such complications include mobile robots, wireless sensor networks, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), spacecraft, and so on. In such networked multi-agent scenarios, the restrictions imposed by the communication graph topology can pose severe problems in the design of cooperative feedback control systems.  Cooperative control of multi-agent systems is a challenging topic for both control theorists and practitioners and has been the subject of significant recent research.

Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems extends optimal control and adaptive control design methods to multi-agent systems on communication graphs.  It develops Riccati design techniques for general linear dynamics for cooperative state feedback design, cooperative observer design, and cooperative dynamic output feedback design.  Both continuous-time and discrete-time dynamical multi-agent systems are treated. Optimal cooperative control is introduced and neural adaptive design techniques for multi-agent nonlinear  systems with unknown dynamics, which are rarely treated in literature are developed. Results spanning systems with first-, second- and on up to general high-order nonlinear dynamics are presented.

Each control methodology proposed is developed by rigorous proofs. All algorithms are justified by simulation examples. The text is self-contained and will serve as an excellent comprehensive source of information for researchers and graduate students working with multi-agent systems.
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