Decentralized control of nonlinear multi-agent systems using single network adaptive critics

The problem of decentralized control of multi-agent nonlinear systems is solved by introducing the concept of virtual agents to generate reference trajectories to be tracked by the actual agents. The tracking problem as an optimal control problem is formulated in the framework of approximate dynamic programming. Solutions are obtained using `single network adaptive critics' and network weight update rule is discussed. Finally, the proposed theory is simulated on the network of several satellites to reach consensus on their attitude. Numerical results demonstrate the versatility and usefulness of the proposed approach.