Cooperative Approximate Output Regulation of Nonlinear Multiagent Systems: Theory and Application

The cooperative output regulation problem of nonlinear multiagent systems has been intensively investigated in the control community under a standard assumption that the exact solution of regulator equations associated with each agent is available. However, this assumption is not realistic for many practical applications. To remove such restriction, this brief further studies a cooperative approximate output regulation problem of nonlinear multiagent systems. A novel distributed neural network (NN) control law is proposed, which integrates a distributed observer and NN controller. In contrast with existing results, the proposed algorithm leads to the solution of the cooperative output regulation problem for a general class of nonlinear multiagent systems, where the exact solution of regulator equations associated with each agent is unavailable. The proposed algorithm is applied to a benchmark problem of cooperative control of multiple inverted pendulum on a cart (IPC) systems and is verified by both simulation and experimental results.