Robust Distributed Stabilization of Heterogeneous Agents Over Cooperation–Competition Networks

Distributed stabilization problem is investigated in this brief for a class of heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MASs) in the presence of exogenous disturbances and cooperation-competition interactions. Specifically, the dynamics of the heterogeneous agents are governed by the second-order systems with the nonlinear intrinsic dynamics where the heterogeneity of agents is mainly reflected in the following three aspects: the intrinsic dynamics of agents, the heterogeneous velocity damping terms, and the exogenous disturbances. With the assumption that the exogenous disturbances are bounded, a discontinuous distributed protocol associated with a time-varying estimator of the agent are designed. Then, with the help of the LaSalle-Yoshizawa theorem for nonsmooth system and the Barbalat's lemma, it is proved that no matter whether the network topology is structurally balanced or not, the heterogeneous MASs can achieve robust distributed stabilization asymptotically as long as the control parameters of the distributed protocol are chosen appropriately. Finally, the derived analytical results are demonstrated by performing a numerical example.