Distributed Adaptive Control Method via Command Governor Mechanism for Uncertain Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems

In this research, we introduce a novel distributed adaptive controller via a command governor mechanism for driving second-order multi-agent systems’ states to the user-assigned positions. The anomalies considered in our problem formulations are agent-based uncertainties and unknown control effectiveness. In the control design process, we account for the actuator dynamics and we use a hedging-based reference model and propose a command governor mechanism for the reference command input to improve the transient response of the considered system. We analyze the stability of the closed-loop multi-agent system using the Lyapunov Stability Theory, and we also use Linear Matrix Inequalities to calculate the stability boundaries for the actuator bandwidths of the agents. Finally, we illustrate the performance of the proposed control algorithm on an undirected line graph with four agents, where we compare transient responses with and without the command governor mechanism.