Reinforcement learning intermittent optimal formation control for multi-agent systems with disturbances

This paper investigates disturbance-resistant intermittent event-triggered optimal formation control problems of second-order multi-agent systems by using the reinforcement learning method, which takes into account the influence of network damage including denial-of-service (DoS) and deception attacks, stochastic noises, and unknown external disturbances. Firstly, we propose a novel disturbance observer based on adaptive control to estimate unknown external disturbances under an event-triggered mechanism. Secondly, by use of estimation of disturbances, an innovative intermittent event-triggered optimal formation algorithm is given. By applying theories such as Lyapunov stability and stochastic stability, sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee that all agents achieve the desired formation in mean square sense. Additionally, in the model-free case, the optimal controller is solved using the least squares method, which is computationally less complex than some existing approaches. Finally, the theoretical results are effectively validated through simulation examples.