Approximate Output Regulation of Discrete-Time Stochastic Multiagent Systems Subject to Heterogeneous and Unknown Dynamics

The output regulation approach has been extensively applied for the cooperative control of heterogeneous multiagent systems (MASs) with known dynamics, but rarely for MASs subject to stochastic and unknown dynamics. One challenging problem is that it is still unclear how to construct the regulator equations of stochastic MASs with unknown dynamics for dynamic exosystem compensation. Toward this end, this article develops a novel distributed control scheme for the approximate output regulation of discrete-time stochastic MASs subject to heterogeneous and unknown nonlinear dynamics. A distributed observer is designed for the exosystem-state estimation of agents, based upon which nonlinear regulator equations are constructed for the feedforward control design, thereby achieving distributed exosystem compensation. A high-order neural network is deployed to approximately solve the nonlinear regulator equations with unknown nonlinearity, and an adaptive control law is developed for the approximate output regulation of discrete-time stochastic MASs. Stability analysis shows that the closed-loop system is semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed control law.