The current paper studies guaranteed cost time-varying formation tracking design and analysis problems of high-order swarm systems subject to intermittent communications. Different from the existing work of the time-varying formation control, the time-varying formation tracking can be achieved while certain performance can be guaranteed, and the impacts of the intermittent communications and switching topologies are considered. First, a new intermittent time-varying formation tracking control protocol with a global performance index is proposed, where not only the formation regulation performances but also (...) the control energy expenditures are involved. The codesign of the gain matrix with the performance index is achieved to compromise the formation regulation performances against control energy expenditures, and the guaranteed cost is determined to restrain the upper bound of the performance index. Then, guaranteed cost time-varying formation tracking design and analysis criteria are given, where the matrix variable of the linear matrix inequality conditions is used to design the gain matrix and to determine the guaranteed cost. Finally, a simulation example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results. (shrink)

This paper investigates robust formation-containment control of discrete-time multiagent systems with exogenous disturbances. Based on the discrete-time disturbance observer method, both state feedback and output feedback control protocols are proposed. Formation-containment conditions are obtained and convergency analysis is given according to Lyapunov stability theory. And, the corresponding control gains are obtained by solving some discrete-time algebraic Riccati equations. Numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the theoretical findings.

This paper investigates the leaderless and leader-follower time-varying formation design and analysis problems for a group of networked agents subject to discontinuous communications. Firstly, a leaderless time-varying formation control protocol is proposed via the intermittent control strategy, where the control input of each agent is constructed by the distributed local state information and formation instructions in the communication time unit, but it is zero in the noncommunication time unit. Then, an explicit formulation of the formation center function is determined to (...) describe the formation movement trajectory of the whole networked agents. Leaderless time-varying formation design and analysis with discontinuous communications are given in the form of linear matrix inequalities. Moreover, the main results of the leaderless cases are extended to the leader-follower cases. Finally, two numerical examples are provided to illustrate the theoretical results of leaderless and leader-follower cases, respectively. (shrink)

The energy-limited time-varying formation control problem of second-order multiagent systems is addressed for both leaderless and leader-following communication topologies in this paper. Different from the previous results, the joint consideration of energy limitation and formation design is more challenging and practical. First, an ETVF control protocol is presented, and the total energy supply is pregiven and limited, which is more common in practical applications. Then, by an orthogonal transformation, the formation control problem is converted into the consensus stabilization problem for (...) second-order leaderless MAS, where sufficient conditions for the ETVF are derived by joint design of control gains and the total energy. At the same time, the explicit formula that forms the formation center function is obtained to depict the macroscopic movement of the multiagent system as a whole. Moreover, the proposed method is also extended to the leader-following communication structure. Finally, two examples are given to verify the effectiveness of our theoretical results. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the optimal output feedback control problem for networked control systems with Markovian packet losses. In this paper, the packet losses occur both between the sensor and controller and between the controller and actuator. Moreover, the packet loss channels are described with two-state Markov chains. Since the precise state information cannot be obtained, thus an optimal recursive estimator is designed. Furthermore, by adopting the dynamic programming approach, we derive the optimal output feedback control, which is based (...) on the solution to a given modified Riccati equation. The obtained results can be seen as an important implementation of the control theory for NCSs with unreliable communication channels. (shrink)