Cooperative control of uncertain multivehicle systems

In this paper, we present a cooperative control architecture for high-order multivehicle systems having non-identical nonlinear uncertain dynamics. For each vehicle, the proposed methodology consists of a local cooperative controller and a vehicle-level controller. The former controller receives the relative output measurements of the neighboring vehicles in order to solve a containment problem formulated on a leader-follower framework. In particular, the leaders generate a trajectory in which the vehicles (followers) converge to the convex hull formed by those of the leaders. For a special case with one leader, this controller synchronizes the output of the vehicles with the output of the leader. The latter controller receives the internal state measurements for suppressing the nonlinear uncertain dynamics of the vehicle by using a decentralized robust adaptive control approach. The interaction topology between vehicles is described by undirected graphs, and extensions to directed graphs are further discussed.