Stability Analysis of Cooperative Control for Heterogeneous Multi-agent Systems with Nonlinear Dynamics

This paper addresses the stability analysis for cooperative control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics under a directed communication topology. Differently from existing works that focus mainly on the consensus for homogeneous multi-agent systems, a novel view which outside of the cases in the literature is proposed to achieve the complete consensus for the closed-loop heterogeneous multi-agent systems under a leader-follower framework. Specifically, we reveal that the stability analysis for the heterogeneous multi-agent systems cannot be held, if the controller is designed only by the neighbors' interaction information and the state feedback gain. The advancement of the proposed approach was further validated by the applications to the problems of obstacle avoidance and formation flight control for heterogeneous multi-vehicle systems with nonlinear dynamics.