A Distributed Adaptive Control Approach to Cooperative Output Regulation of a Class of Heterogeneous Uncertain Multi-agent Systems

We propose a distributed adaptive control approach to the cooperative output regulation problem for a class of heterogeneous uncertain multi-agent systems over general directed graphs. This approach breaks the original problem into two problems: (i) cooperative linear output regulation with an internal model-based distributed control; (ii) model reference adaptive control for each agent. Specifically, a distributed reference model characterizing the desired closed-loop response is constructed by solving the first problem. We show that the output of this reference model is tracked by the uncertain multi-agent system while keeping all the state variables of the closed-loop system bounded by solving the second problem. The decoupling between these two problems is achieved by a new decoupling virtual tracking error (that is, information exchange between agents). A numerical example demonstrates an application of the proposed approach to a heterogeneous multi-vehicle system consisting of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles in formation.