Cooperative H∞ output regulation of heterogeneous parameter-dependent multi-agent systems

Abstract This paper addresses the cooperative output regulation problem for heterogeneous multi-agent systems with parameter-dependent linear fractional transformation (LFT) dynamics and unknown local, external perturbations. A novel distributed semi-LFT gain-scheduling protocol is proposed to achieve cooperative output regulation and H ∞ disturbance attenuation performance. This new distributed control scheme advances existing techniques in two important ways: (1) more general heterogeneous uncertain agent dynamics are considered under a directed communication topology; and (2) new distributed control synthesis conditions are derived and formulated as independent sets of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) plus linear matrix equations, such that the optimal distributed control solution can be obtained effectively via convex optimization. Two examples have been used to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed approach in multi-agent consensus and formation control, respectively.