Output regulation of a class of multi-agent systems using conditional servocompensators

Multiple agents - sometimes referred to as swarm of agents - and their control have been seeking interest significantly over the course of recent years. Their ability to move in desired formations and perform synchronized tasks have been the key arena in their development. In this research work, design of the continuous sliding mode controller for the output regulation of a multi agent system is studied. The idea of using conditional servocompensators for improving transient performance while achieving steady-state accuracy was introduced in the literature and has been shown to be a useful tool to achieve regulation of minimum phase nonlinear systems. We extend the use of the same approach to a class of multi-agent systems comprising of finite number of agents. The control scheme presented in this work is based on sliding mode control technique and incorporates a conditional servocompensator. Closed-loop analysis under the proposed control scheme for the multi-agent system is provided. Simulation results in the form of output trajectories of individual agents and error convergence are provided to illustrate the discussed approach.