Optimal Synchronization of Heterogeneous Nonlinear Systems with Unknown Dynamics
Abstract
Optimal output synchronization of multi-agent leader-follower systems with unknown nonlinear dynamics is considered. The agents are assumed heterogeneous so that the dynamics may be nonidentical. A distributed observer is designed to estimate the leader state for each agent. A discounted performance function is defined for each agent, and an augmented Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation is derived to find its minimal value. The HJB solution depends on the trajectories of the local state and the distributed observer state. A control protocol based on the HJB solution assures that the synchronization error goes to zero locally asymptotically fast for all agents. The proposed approach has two main advantages compared to standard output synchronization methods. First, it is optimal in the sense that it not only makes the steady-state synchronization error zero, but also minimizes the transient error. Second, it does not require the explicit solution to the output regulator equations, though the HJB solutions implicitly provide optimal solutions to them. Finally, a reinforcement learning technique is used to learn the optimal control protocol for each agent without requiring any knowledge of the agents or the leader dynamics. Simulation studies on a notional multi-agent system validate the proposed approach.
Recommended Citation
H. Modares et al., "Optimal Synchronization of Heterogeneous Nonlinear Systems with Unknown Dynamics," IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. 63, no. 1, pp. 117 - 131, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Jan 2018.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1109/TAC.2017.2713339
Department(s)
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Keywords and Phrases
Distributed Observer; Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB); Optimal Output Synchronization; Reinforcement Learning (RL)
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
0018-9286
Document Type
Article - Journal
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2018 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), All rights reserved.
Publication Date
01 Jan 2018
Comments
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant ECCS-1405173 and Grant IIS-1208623, in part by the Office of Naval Research under Grant N00014-13-1-0562 and Grant N000141410718, and in part by the Army Research Office under Grant W911NF-11-D-0001