Discrete-Time Linear Distributed Tracking Protocols for Nonlinearly Interconnected Multiagent Systems

摘要

Centralized and decentralized strategies have been widely used to control large-scale systems in which, by definition, subsystems are physically coupled to each others. In the former case, a powerful central processor is required to collect and process all subsystem's information, and generate the control commands. In the latter approach, the knowledge about physical interconnection is used to design a set of decentralized low-dimension controllers to be implemented locally around each subsystem. Motivated by the technological improvements in the embedded systems and theoretical advances in the distributed consensus of multiagent systems, we investigate a reference tracking problem for large-scale systems with partially known dynamics in which each subsystem has appropriate sensing, communication, and computation capabilities. We consider three modeling scenarios where the multiagent system is built by first-, second-, or mixed first- and second-order interconnected agents. By approximating the interconnected system dynamics, we develop a discrete-time domain framework for designing fixed and static communication topologies for the considered interconnected systems without local control implementations. For each modeling scenario, we characterize a sufficient condition on the sampling time interval in order to ensure the robust exponential tracking and obtain the guaranteed bounds on the convergence rate and quadratic cost function. We also comment on the discrete-time scenario compared to the equivalent continuous-time results.