H Cluster Formation Control of Networked Multiagent Systems With Stochastic Sampling

IEEE Trans Cybern. 2021 Dec;51(12):5761-5772. doi: 10.1109/TCYB.2019.2959201. Epub 2021 Dec 22.

Abstract

This article is concerned with the H cluster formation control of a multiagent system (MAS) with stochastic sampling in network environments. First, based on a directed communication topology with acyclic partition, agents are separated into several clusters. The agents moving in the same cluster are expected to achieve a desired formation collaboratively, while the agents in different clusters have different formation patterns. Second, the external disturbance for each agent is taken into account. The associated H cluster formation control, whose performance bound can be obtained by considering both formation information and cluster characteristics, is introduced to measure the disturbance attenuation ability. Third, by casting a stochastic sampled-data-based H cluster formation problem into an H control problem of a stochastic system, an H cluster formation criterion is derived for the MAS with external disturbance. Finally, a lower-dimensional cluster formation criterion is obtained for the disturbance-free MAS. Cluster formation performance analysis testifies the effectiveness of the proposed design methods.