Cooperative Output Regulation of Networked Motors Under Switching Communication and Detectability Constraints

In this brief, we study the cooperative output regulation of linear multiagent systems under switching communication topology and exosystem detectability constraints, and applications to the synchronization of networked motors. Compared to similar works in the literature, in this brief, we consider the problem scenario in which none of the agents can estimate the exosystem states from their individual measurements on any of the switching configurations of the system. In other words, no agent in the system can solve the output regulation problem independently. By devising a distributed observer on the exosystem states, and under intuitive assumptions on the combined detectability of the multiagent system and joint connectivity of the information graphs, we are able to solve the problem by a distributed feedback protocol. Finally, the developed theoretical results are applied to the synchronization problem of a group of motors in a time-varying communication network.