Research

The granted NSFC project for young investigators studies the consensus problem of multi-agent systems under complex environments from two aspects: the agent’s dynamics and the network communication constraints. Up to date, 17 papers have been published or formally accepted. Among them, 12 papers, including 9 papers published in IEEE Transactions and Automatica, are indexed by SCI. The platform of multiple mobile robots has been established and some proposed consensus algorithms have been verified on this platform. Based on this, 1 invention patent and 1 software copyright have been applied. The applicant has been enrolled into the “Beijing Nova Program” and the “Youth Innovation Promotion Association, Chinese Academy of Sciences”, and he has also been invited to join the editorial board of two SCI-indexed journals. Based on the research outcomes of the granted NSFC project, the proposed “continuation project” investigates the coordination problems of general linear multi-agent systems from three aspects. Specifically, the optimal consensus of general linear multi-agent systems; the stochastic consensus of general linear multi-agent systems under switching communication topologies; and the dynamic tracking of general linear multi-agent systems when the leader’s control input is non-zero. In addition, the multi-robot system is to be further improved, and then the proposed algorithms are to be applied on this platform to verify their effectiveness. The proposed project can not only contribute more theory and methods to the field of the coordination of multi-agent systems but also build a firm foundation for its real-world applications.