Active Disturbance Rejection Formation Control for Multiagent Systems With Input Constraints

This article deals with the formation control of multiagent systems (MASs) subject to disturbances and input constraints, and an active disturbance rejection formation control (ADRFC) approach based on distributed observation is proposed. First, the states and disturbances of tracking error systems are estimated by a distributed intermediate estimator (DIE). Second, an improved distributed model-predictive control (IDMPC) is proposed to achieve the formation control of MASs under disturbances and input constraints. Then, the robust ADRFC method is designed by combining the DIE and IDMPC, and the stability of the whole system is analyzed. Finally, experiments are conducted on an MAS consisting of four mobile robots to illustrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

I. Introduction

In Recent years, multiagent systems (MASs) [1], [2] have received more and more attention due to their wide applications in the fields of intelligent detection [3], logistics and transportation [4], disaster relief [5], and other areas. Then, as one of the main applications of MASs, formation control tasks [6] become a major research hot spot, and a variety of formation control methods have been designed, such as leader–follower-based methods [7], virtual-structure-based methods [8], and behavior-based methods [9]. On the other hand, disturbances caused by modeling uncertainties, aging and wear of components, environmental noise, and many other factors are another troublesome issues in the formation control task of MASs. Furthermore, disturbances in any agent can spread to the whole system through the communication topology, which may seriously deteriorate the system performance or even destabilize the MAS.