Appointed-time consensus control of multi-agent systems for vessel steering under directed and periodical switching topologies

• Published in: 2019 Chinese Control Conference (CCC) pp. 5532 - 5537
• Main Authors: Gan, Jianpeng, Wu, Qinghe
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Technical Committee on Control Theory, Chinese Association of Automation 01.07.2019
• Subjects: Appointed-time Consensus; Dynamics; Estimation; Motion-planning Approach; Multi-agent systems; Nomoto Dynamics; Switches; Topology; Vessel Steering
• ISSN: 2161-2927
• DOI: 10.23919/ChiCC.2019.8865156

This paper investigates the appointed-time consensus problem of multi-agent systems with Nomoto dynamics in vessel steering under directed and periodical switching topologies. The appointed-time means that the consensus arriving time can be off-line preassigned according to task requirements without conservative estimation and is independent of the initial conditions of agents states. From a motion-planning perspective and Pontryagin' s principle, a novel distributed appointed-time algorithm is developed for a multi-agent system with Nomoto dynamics. Under the assumption that the union of the directed periodical switching topologies contains a directed spanning tree, the proposed distributed algorithms can guarantee the multi-agent system to achieve consensus at an appointed time. Finally, the effectiveness of the protocol is illustrated by numerical simulation.