ABSTRACT
The cooperative control problem of multi-agent systems is mainly composed of three components, namely, the agent dynamics, the interactions among the agents, and the cooperative control laws required to achieve the group objective. The selection of the cooperative control laws depends on the agent dynamics and the interaction topology. For multi-agent systems concerned by the systems and control community, the agents are generally dynamically decoupled from each other, which implies the necessity of cooperation in terms of information exchange between the agents to achieve collective behavior. In the area of cooperative control of multi-agent systems, consensus is an important and fundamental problem, which is closely related to formation control, flocking, and distributed estimation. Consensus problems have a long history in computer science and form the foundation of distributed computing. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
