Consensus in High-Power Multiagent Systems With Mixed Unknown Control Directions via Hybrid Nussbaum-Based Control

This work investigates the consensus tracking problem for high-power nonlinear multiagent systems with partially unknown control directions. The main challenge of considering such dynamics lies in the fact that their linearized dynamics contain uncontrollable modes, making the standard backstepping technique fail; also, the presence of mixed unknown control directions (some being known and some being unknown) requires a piecewise Nussbaum function that exploits the
a priori
knowledge of the known control directions. The piecewise Nussbaum function technique leaves some open problems, such as Can the technique handle multiagent dynamics beyond the standard backstepping procedure? and Can the technique handle more than one control direction for each agent? In this work, we propose a hybrid Nussbaum technique that can handle uncertain agents with high-power dynamics where the backstepping procedure fails, with nonsmooth behaviors (switching and quantization), and with multiple unknown control directions for each agent.