Adaptive Consensus Output Regulation of A Class of Heterogeneous Nonlinear Systems

This paper deals with consensus output regulation of a class of network-connected nonlinear systems with unknown parameters. The subsystem may have different dynamics with uncertainties, and under the disturbances generated from an exosystem, and only some subsystems have access to the desired output, which is also formulated as an output of the exosystem, following the standard formulation of output regulation of nonlinear systems. For the clarity of the presentation, we only show the control design of the systems with 2nd-order dynamics. The proposed design makes use of some latest results on Laplacian matrices, and a new design of the internal model, which is based on known functions with unknown constant parameters. Adaptive backstepping design techniques are integrated with the consensus control design to tackle the nonlinearity and unknown constant parameters in the system, and unknown functions relating to the state of the exosystem. The proposed control inputs and adaptive laws are fully decentralized, and ensure the asymptotic convergence to zero of the regulation errors.