Multi-robot cooperative control has gained extensive research interest due to its wide applications in civil, security, and military domains. This paper proposes a cooperative control algorithm for multi-robot systems with general linear dynamics. The algorithm is based on distributed cooperative optimisation and output regulation, and it achieves global optimum by utilising only information shared among neighbouring robots. Technically, a high-level distributed optimisation algorithm for multi-robot systems is presented, which will serve as an optimal reference generator for each individual agent. Then, based on the distributed optimisation algorithm, an output regulation method is utilised to solve the optimal coordination problem for general linear dynamic systems. The convergence of the proposed algorithm is theoretically proved. Both numerical simulations and real-time physical robot experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed cooperative control algorithms.

翻译：多机器人协同控制因其在民用、安保及军事领域的广泛应用而受到广泛研究关注。本文针对一般线性动力学模型的多机器人系统，提出了一种基于分布式协同优化与输出调节的协同控制算法。该算法仅通过相邻机器人间的信息共享即可实现全局最优。技术上，首先提出了一种面向多机器人系统的高层分布式优化算法，该算法可为每个独立智能体生成最优参考信号；进而基于该分布式优化算法，采用输出调节方法解决了一般线性动态系统的最优协调问题。理论上证明了所提算法的收敛性。通过数值仿真与实时物理机器人实验，验证了所提协同控制算法的有效性。