English

A Separation-Based Methodology to Consensus Tracking of Switched High-Order Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems

Multiagent Systems 2020-06-11 v1 Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

This work investigates a reduced-complexity adaptive methodology to consensus tracking for a team of uncertain high-order nonlinear systems with switched (possibly asynchronous) dynamics. It is well known that high-order nonlinear systems are intrinsically challenging as feedback linearization and backstepping methods successfully developed for low-order systems fail to work. At the same time, even the adding-one power-integrator methodology, well explored for the single-agent high-order case, presents some complexity issues and is unsuited for distributed control. At the core of the proposed distributed methodology is a newly proposed definition for separable functions: this definition allows the formulation of a separation-based lemma to handle the high-order terms with reduced complexity in the control design. Complexity is reduced in a twofold sense: the control gain of each virtual control law does not have to be incorporated in the next virtual control law iteratively, thus leading to a simpler expression of the control laws; the order of the virtual control gains increases only proportionally (rather than exponentially) with the order of the systems, dramatically reducing high-gain issues.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.05799,
  title  = {A Separation-Based Methodology to Consensus Tracking of Switched High-Order Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems},
  author = {Maolong Lv and Wenwu Yu and Jinde Cao and Simone Baldi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.05799},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:12:24.252Z