Robust Distributed Stabilization of Interconnected Multiagent Systems

Many large-scale systems can be modeled as groups of individual dynamics, e.g., multi-vehicle systems, as well as interconnected multiagent systems, power systems and biological networks as a few examples. Due to the high-dimension and complexity in configuration of these infrastructures, only a few internal variables of each agent might be measurable and the exact knowledge of the model might be unavailable for the control design purpose. The collective objectives may range from consensus to decoupling, stabilization, reference tracking, and global performance guarantees. Depending on the objectives, the designer may choose agent-level low-dimension or multiagent system-level high-dimension approaches to develop distributed algorithms. With an inappropriately designed algorithm, the effect of modeling uncertainty may propagate over the communication and coupling topologies and degrade the overall performance of the system. We address this problem by proposing single- and multi-layer structures. The former is used for both individual and interconnected multiagent systems. The latter, inspired by cyber-physical systems, is devoted to the interconnected multiagent systems. We focus on developing a single control-theoretic tool to be used for the relative information-based distributed control design purpose for any combinations of the aforementioned configuration, objective, and approach. This systematic framework guarantees robust stability and performance of the closed-loop multiagent systems. We validate these theoretical results through various simulation studies