This book provides a systematic framework for designing distributed controllers for multi-agent systems with general linear agent dynamics, linear agent dynamics with uncertainties, and Lipschitz nonlinear agent dynamics. The proposed consensus region decouples the design of the feedback gain matrices of the cooperative protocols from the communication graph and serves as a measure for the robustness of the protocols to variations of the communication graph. By exploiting the decoupling feature, adaptive cooperative protocols are presented that can be designed and implemented in a fully distributed fashion.

Distributed controller design is generally a challenging task, especially for multi-agent systems with complex dynamics, due to the interconnected effect of the agent dynamics, the interaction graph among agents, and the cooperative control laws. Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems: A Consensus Region Approach offers a systematic framework for designing distributed controllers for multi-agent systems with general linear agent dynamics, linear agent dynamics with uncertainties, and Lipschitz nonlinear agent dynamics.

Beginning with an introduction to cooperative control and graph theory, this monograph:

• Explores the consensus control problem for continuous-time and discrete-time linear multi-agent systems
• Studies the H8 and H2 consensus problems for linear multi-agent systems subject to external disturbances
• Designs distributed adaptive consensus protocols for continuous-time linear multi-agent systems
• Considers the distributed tracking control problem for linear multi-agent systems with a leader of nonzero control input
• Examines the distributed containment control problem for the case with multiple leaders
• Covers the robust cooperative control problem for multi-agent systems with linear nominal agent dynamics subject to heterogeneous matching uncertainties
• Discusses the global consensus problem for Lipschitz nonlinear multi-agent systems

Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems: A Consensus Region Approach provides a novel approach to designing distributed cooperative protocols for multi-agent systems with complex dynamics. The proposed consensus region decouples the design of the feedback gain matrices of the cooperative protocols from the communication graph and serves as a measure for the robustness of the protocols to variations of the communication graph. By exploiting the decoupling feature, adaptive cooperative protocols are presented that can be designed and implemented in a fully distributed fashion.