Control of multivehicle systems in the presence of uncertain dynamics

In this paper, we present a cooperative control architecture for high-order multivehicle systems having non-identical nonlinear uncertain dynamics. The proposed methodology consists of a local cooperative controller and a vehicle-level controller for each vehicle. 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. Specifically, the leaders generate trajectories 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 dynamical of the vehicle by using a decentralized adaptive control approach. The interaction topology between vehicles is described by undirected graphs and extensions to directed graphs are further discussed. The stability and convergence properties of the proposed cooperative control architecture are analyzed by using the results from linear algebra and the Lyapunov theory. Several numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the e cacy of the proposed cooperative control architecture.