Control Design of Multiagent Discrete-Time Systems

Book excerpt: This book describes an effective approach to the cooperative and coordinated control of multivehicle systems. This rigorous analytic approach guarantees the stability of coordinated and cooperating vehicles using distributed protocols and uses low-energy, event-triggered mechanisms for networked vehicle control. The text covers: design of a cooperative protocol to achieve consensus for multivehicle systems, allowing cooperation that is resistant to the effects of packet loss and/or adversarial attack; analysis and synthesis of an event-triggering mechanism for cooperative multivehicle systems over uncertain networks; and the problem of distributed leader-following consensus and methods for compelling multivehicle systems to reach consensus. Throughout the book, cooperation problems are transformed into stability problems. Lyapunov theory is used to guarantee cooperation among agents. The distributed approach is applied to triggering mechanisms, the cooperation process, and the impact of cyber-attacks. Discrete-time analysis shows how the event-based structure can be designed to match the performance of continuous-time counterparts. The book details applications and computer simulation with several practical examples. This book is of interest to a wide audience from the graduate student, through the academic researcher to the industrial practitioner, all of them sharing a common interest in the stability and security of multiagent systems.