Adaptive Distributed Synchronization of Multiple Vehicles With Actuator Nonlinearities: Design and Experimentation

This article aims to investigate a distributed synchronization problem of multiple vehicles with unknown actuator nonlinearities under a directed communication network. In the existing works of multiple agent systems (MAS) that are feasible for modeling the synchronization of multiple vehicles, actuators are usually assumed to perform perfectly in a linear condition, which, however, contradicts practical dynamical systems. To attack such an assumption, we propose an adaptive fully distributed synchronization protocol that is capable of handling unknown actuator nonlinearities in multiple vehicles. Two distributed adaptive laws are designed for each follower vehicle, wherein one adaptive law is for tuning unknown scaling coefficients from actuator nonlinearities and also for unknown graph gains from the directed communication network, and the other adaptive law is for tackling unmodeled and bounded disturbances. It is proved that the synchronization error in the vehicle synchronization is asymptotically stable under the proposed protocol regardless of unknown nonlinearities on actuators. Both simulation and experimental studies are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control protocol.