Distributed Position Tracking of Multi-Rollers in Roll-Bending Forming Using Multi-Agent Cooperative Control

In the roll-bending forming process, the manual or open-loop control of the current roll bending machine leads to poor synchronization of rolls, and the cumulative deviation will increase over time. The distributed cooperative control of multiple rollers has become the main trend of the roll-bending process development, and the position tracking strategy of the rollers has gradually become a research hotspot in the roll-bending field. Therefore, this paper proposes a distributed position tracking strategy for multi-rollers in roll bending forming based on multi-agent cooperative control. The dynamic model of the roller is established and the position tracking error system of the roller is defined, and the distributed control method of the roller with multi-agent cooperation is proposed. The backstepping method is used to design the virtual control input and the actual control input, and an observer is designed to estimate the dynamic influence of the unmodeled dynamics. In addition, the stability and boundedness of the tracking error are proved by Lyapunov stability theory. The effectiveness of the strategy is verified by simulation result. This strategy replaces the traditional method of manually adjusting the rollers to coordinately control the relative position of each roller, so as to improve the position control accuracy and make the left and right lower rollers run more smoothly.