Human-in-the-Loop Consensus Control for Multiagent Systems With External Disturbances

In this article, the human-in-the-loop leader–follower consensus control problem is addressed for multiagent systems (MASs) with unknown external disturbances. A human operator is deployed to monitor the MASs’ team by transmitting an execution signal to a nonautonomous leader in response to any hazard detected, with the control input of the leader unknown to all followers. For each follower, a full-order observer, in which the observer error dynamic system decouples the unknown disturbance input, is designed for asymptotic state estimation. Then, an interval observer is constructed for the consensus error dynamic system, where the unknown disturbances and control inputs of its neighbors and its disturbance are treated as unknown inputs (UIs). To process the UIs, a new asymptotic algebraic UI reconstruction (UIR) scheme is proposed based on the interval observer, and one of the significant features of the UIR is the capacity to decouple the control input of the follower. The subsequent human-in-the-loop asymptotic convergence consensus protocol is developed by applying an observer-based distributed control strategy. Finally, the proposed control scheme is validated through two simulation examples.