Cooperative Control of Multiple Agents With Unknown High-Frequency Gain Signs Under Unbalanced and Switching Topologies

Existing results on cooperative control of multiagent systems with unknown control directions require that the underlying topology is either fixed with a strongly connected graph or switching between different strongly connected graphs. Furthermore, in most cases the graph is assumed to be balanced. This paper proposes a new class of nonlinear proportional-integral (PI) based algorithms to relax these requirements and allow for unbalanced and switching topologies having a jointly strongly connected basis. This is made possible for single-integrator (SI) and double-integrator (DI) agents with nonidentical unknown control directions by a suitable selection of the distributed nonlinear PI functions. Moreover, as a special case, the proposed algorithms are applied to strongly connected and fixed graphs. Finally, simulation examples are given to show the validity of our theoretical results.