Keynote address II: A framework for the control of multi-agent systems

Over the past decade, with the increasing applications of wireless sensor networks, coordination of a group of mobile robots, autonomous vehicle formation and so on, various cooperative control problems such as consensus, flocking, and formation of multi-agent systems have attracted intensive attention. In this talk, we will describe a framework for handling various control problems for a multi-agent system. This framework will be called the cooperated output regulation problem. The core of this framework includes the establishment of the concepts of the distributed observer, and the distributed internal model. On one hand, we will show that this framework will set a stage for solving the asymptotic tracking and disturbance rejection problem in an uncertain multi-agent system via a distributed control approach. On the other hand, we will show that this framework contains many control problems of multi-agent systems such as consensus, synchronization, and formation as special cases, thus leading to a unified solution to several different control problems of multi-agent systems.