Composite Nonlinear Feedback Control for Cooperative Output Regulation of Linear Multi-Agent Systems with Input Saturation

This paper investigates the cooperative output regulation problem of multi-agent systems. Each agent is modeled as a general linear system with input saturation, and the network topology among agents is represented by a directed graph containing a directed spanning tree. A distributed dynamic control law based on composite nonlinear feedback (CNF) control technique is developed, which consists of a distributed dynamic compensator and a controller with a linear feedback law leading to small damping ratio and a nonlinear feedback law making the system to be highly damped as the tracking error decreases to reduce the overshoot. It is shown that the cooperative output regulation problem can be solved and the transient performance of the multi-agent systems can be improved by properly tuning the parameters of the nonlinear feedback. The effectiveness of the theoretical results is illustrated by a numerical example.