Prof. Jie Huang
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
Title: Output Synchronization for a Class of MIMO Uncertain Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems over Switching Networks
Abstarct: Multi-agent control systems arise from numerous engineering applications such as synchronized motion of multiple robots, formation flying of multiple fight vehicles, mobile sensor area coverage, control of power grids, etc. It has been a central control problem for over a decade. A typical multi-agent system contains a follower system consisting of multiple subsystems called followers and a leader system that provides the reference signals to the followers. What distinguishes the control of multi-agent systems from the conventional control for a single system is that the control law for multi-agent systems must be distributed. The leader-following output synchronization problem aims to design a distributed control law to enable the outputs of each follower asymptotically track a reference trajectory generated by the leader system and the problem has been extensively studied for various classes of multi-agent systems for over a decade. In this talk, we further study the same problem for a quite general class of uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems. Compared with the existing results, the class of multi-agent systems is more general in two aspects. First, each subsystem here can be a multi-input, multi-output systems. Second, the coefficient of the control of each subsystem in the literature is assumed to be unity. In contrast, we allow the coefficient of the control of each subsystem in this talk is an uncertain positive definite matrix. Our approach integrates the output-based adaptive distributed observer, the conventional adaptive control technique, and the output regulation theory and retains the main merits of the existing results. Our problem includes the state consensus problem as a special case if the followers and the leader have the same order.
Bio: Jie Huang completed his Ph.D. study in automatic control at Johns Hopkins University in 1990. After a year with Johns Hopkins University as a postdoctoral fellow and four years with industry in USA, he joined the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in September 1995, and is now Choh-Ming Li Research Professor of Mechanical and Automation Engineering. His research interests include nonlinear control, networked multi-agent systems control, game theory, and guidance and control of flight vehicles. He has authored/co-authored four monographs and over 400 papers.