Decentralized Sliding Control of Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems Subject to Communication Delays

Abstract

This paper investigates decentralized sliding mode control (SMC) of multi-agent cooperative systems when the inter-agent communication delay cannot be neglected. A new algorithm is proposed to control and maintain the cooperation objectives when large communication delays occur due to faulty network conditions. The faulty agents perform prediction of all other agents in order to perform decentralized SMC. An upper bound is also derived for the state prediction error. The new approach is applied to formation control of a group of wheeled mobile robots. Simulation results show that the proposed approach has good performance and stability properties for cases with large delay compared to centralized SMC.