Decentralized Control of Multiple Agents with Unknown Control Directions

In the literature, we investigate the decentralized control of networked nonlinear agents with uncertainties and unknown control directions, i.e., the sign of the high-frequency-gain in agent's dynamic is unknown. A Nussbaum-type adaptive controller is designed with the aid of nonlinear damping technique for each agent such that consensus of the network can be achieved, meanwhile, the overall system is insured to be bounded. The controller for each agent is composed by a Nussbaumtype item which seeks the control direction adaptively, a distributed item to drive the system to consensus and a nonlinear damping item to handle the uncertainty in agent's dynamic. It is proved that consensus of the network can be realized via the proposed controller. Moreover, the final consensus state is indicated, which is significant for consensus of networked nonlinear systems. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.