Consensus controllers for general integrator multi-agent systems: analysis, design and application to autonomous surface vessels

This study addresses the distributed H ∞ and H 2 consensus control problems for multi-agent systems with general integrator dynamics and undirected topology. First, based on the frequency domain description of linear multi-agent systems, a sufficient and necessary condition is imposed on each controller to achieve consensus. Second, both H ∞ and H 2 optimal controllers are computed analytically according to the corresponding performance indices. The novel controllers not only can optimise the reference tracking performance but also has a simple tuning way to trade off the nominal performance and robustness. Finally, by application to the formation control of autonomous surface vessels shows the effectiveness of the proposed two control strategies.