Receding optimal synthesis of robust consensus for multi-agent systems with limited communication

ABSTRACT

A novel strategy based on the robust distributed model predictive control (DMPC) is proposed in this paper to address the consensus of multi-agent systems subjected to unknown-but-bounded disturbances with limited communication range. The proposed strategy utilises the formulation of the tube-based predictive control and has the ability to handle the explicit input constraints and achieve the bounded consensus with initial communication topology preserved under the disturbances. In this proposed strategy, a novel constraint is designed to guarantee the connectivity of the system under the disturbances, and the synthesis methods are proposed for the controller. Meanwhile, it is proved that the proposed algorithm in this paper is recursively feasible, the connectivity can always be preserved and the system can finally reach bounded consensus under the disturbances. A simulation example is provided to demonstrate the proposed robust DMPC-based strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Consensus
• multi-agent systems
• distributed model predictive control
• connectivity-preserving

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.