Consensus Control for Heterogeneous Multivehicle Systems: An Iterative Learning Approach

This article investigates the consensus tracking problem of the heterogeneous multivehicle systems (MVSs) under a repeatable control environment. First, a unified iterative learning control (ILC) algorithm is presented for all autonomous vehicles, each of which is governed by both discrete- and continuous-time nonlinear dynamics. Then, several consensus criteria for MVSs with switching topology and external disturbances are established based on our proposed distributed ILC protocols. For discrete-time systems, all vehicles can perfectly track to the common reference trajectory over a specified finite time interval, and the corresponding digraphs may not have spanning trees. Existing approaches dealing with the continuous-time systems generally require that all vehicles have strictly identical initial conditions, being too ideal in practice. We relax this unpractical assumption and propose an extra distributed initial state learning protocol such that vehicles can take different initial states, leading to the fact that the finite time tracking is achieved ultimately regardless of the initial errors. Finally, a numerical example demonstrates the effectiveness of our theoretical results.