Consensus Control for Multi-Agent Sytems with Input Delay

  • Chunyan Wang

Student thesis: Phd

Abstract

This thesis applies predictor-based methods for the distributed consensus control of multi-agent systems with input delay. "Multi-agent systems" is a term used to describe a group of agents which are connected together to achieve specified control tasks over a communication network. In many applications, the subsystems or agents are required to reach an agreement upon certain quantities of interest, which is referred to as "consensus control". This input delay may represent delays in the network communication. The main contribution of this thesis is to provide feasible methods to deal with the consensus control for general multi-agent systems with input delay.The consensus control for general linear multi-agent systems with parameter uncertainties and input delay is first investigated under directed network connection. Artstein reduction method is applied to deal with the input delay. By transforming the Laplacian matrix into the real Jordan form, delay-dependent conditions are derived to guarantee the robust consensus control for uncertain multi-agent systems with input delay. Then, the results are extended to a class of Lipschitz nonlinear multi-agent systems and the impacts of Lipschitz nonlinearity and input delay in consensus control are investigated. By using tools from control theory and graph theory, sufficient conditions based on the Lipschitz constant are identified for proposed protocols to tackle the nonlinear terms in the system dynamics.Other than the time delay, external disturbances are inevitable in various practical systems including the multi-agent systems. The consensus disturbance rejection problems are investigated. For linear multi-agent systems with bounded external disturbances, Truncated Predictor Feedback (TPF) approach is applied to deal with the input delay and the H_infinity consensus analysis is put in the framework of Lyapunov analysis. Sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee the H_infinity consensus in time domain. Some disturbances in real engineering problems have inherent characteristics such as harmonics and unknown constant load. For those kinds of disturbances in Lipschitz nonlinear multi-agent systems with input delay, Disturbance Observer-Based Control (DOBC) technique is applied to design the disturbance observers. A new predictor-based control scheme is constructed for each agent by utilizing the estimate of the disturbance and the prediction of the relative state information. Sufficient delay-dependent conditions are derived to guarantee consensus with disturbance rejection.
Date of Award31 Dec 2016
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • The University of Manchester
SupervisorZhengtao Ding (Supervisor) & Barry Lennox (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Consensus Control
  • Multi-Agent Systems
  • Input Delay

Cite this

'