Coordinated orbit-tracking control of second-order non-linear agents with directed communication topologies

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with two-dimensional and three-dimensional cooperative control of multiple agents formation tracking a set of given closed orbits, where each agent has intrinsic second-order non-linear dynamics and the communication topology among agents is directed. By using our previous curve extension method, the cooperative control system can be regarded as a cascade system composed of the orbit-tracking subsystem and the formation subsystem with the orbit-tracking error as input. A novel solution is established by separatively designing the orbit-tracking control law and the formation control protocol ignoring the perturbation at first and then applying input-to-state stability theory to analyse the asymptotic stability of the cascade system. It is shown that the closed-loop system is asymptotic stability if the directed communication topology contains a directed spanning tree. The effectiveness of the analytical results is verified by numerical simulations.

Keywords:

• Coordinated orbit-tracking control
• second-order non-linear dynamics
• curve extension
• cascade system
• directed communication topology

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous referees for comments and suggestions that greatly improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation (NNSF) of China [grant number 61203356], [grant number 61473081], [grant number 61473138]; Doctoral Fund of Ministry of Education of China [grant number 20110092120025]; and the open fund of Key Laboratory of Measurement and Control of Complex Systems of Engineering, Ministry of Education [grant number MCCSE2014B01] and in part by a Project Funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions.

Notes on contributors

Y.-Y. Chen

Yang-Yang Chen received his BS and MS degrees from Hefei University of Technology of China, and his PhD degree from Southeast University of China in 2003, 2006, 2010, respectively. Since 2010, he has been with Southeast University, Nanjing, China, where he is currently an associate professor with School of Automation. His research interests include cooperative control, multi-agent systems, and nonlinear control.

Y. Zhang

Ya Zhang received her BS degree in applied mathematics from China University of Mining And Technology in 2004, PhD degree in control engineering from Southeast University, China, in 2010. Since 2010, she has been with Southeast University, Nanjing, China, where she is currently an associate professor with School of Automation. Her research interests include cooperative control, multi-agent systems, and networked control systems.

C.-L. Liu

Cheng-Lin Liu received his bachelor degree in electrical engineering and automation from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China in 2003, PhD degree in control theory and control engineering from Southeast University, China in 2009. Since 2008, he has been with Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China, where he is currently an associate professor at School of IOT Engineering. From March 2014 to March 2015, he was with School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Nanyang Technological University as a visiting scholar. His current research interests include sensor networks and coordination control of multi-agent systems.

P. Wei

Ping Wei received her BS and MS degrees from Hefei University of Technology of China in 2005 and 2009, respectively. She worked as a teaching assistant at Anhui Polytechnic University of China during 2009–2010. She is now a lecturer at Anhui Business College of China. Her research interest includes intelligent control and multi-agent systems.