Cooperative Adaptive Model-Free Control With Model-Free Estimation and Online Gain Tuning

In this article, a distributed adaptive model-free control algorithm is proposed for consensus and formation-tracking problems in a network of agents with completely unknown nonlinear dynamic systems. The specification of the communication graph in the network is incorporated in the adaptive laws for estimation of the unknown linear and nonlinear terms, and in the online updating of the elements in the main controller gain matrix. The decentralized control signal at each agent in the network requires information about the states of the leader agent, as well as the desired formation variables of the agents in a local coordinate frame. These two sets of variables are provided at each agent by utilizing two recently proposed distributed observers. It is shown that only a spanning-tree rooted at the leader agent is enough for the convergence and stability of the proposed cooperative control and observer algorithms. Two simulation studies are provided to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison with two state-of-the-art distributed model-free control algorithms. With lower control effort as well as fewer offline gain tuning, the same level of consensus errors is achieved. Finally, the application of the proposed solution is studied in the formation-tracking control of a team of autonomous aerial mobile robots via simulation results.