Predictive control strategy for multi-agent relay tracking systems with time delays

This paper investigates the multi-agent systems for target tracking applications, in which the target is cooperatively relay tracked by multiple agents based on the Voronoi diagram. The relay tracking scheme is effective and reduces the tracking time of a target. However, the existence of time delays results in inaccurate determination of boundaries of Voronoi cells. Thus, the replacement of tracking agent is no longer optimal, which consequently affects the tracking time. In order to solve this issue, a predictive controller is proposed for the relay tracking system with time delays. Moreover, the boundaries of Voronoi cells are determined with the predictive values of agents’ information. In order to analyze the stability of the system, an impulse-time-dependent Lyapunov function is designed. Then, the orthogonal polynomials based inequality is applied and the average dwell time switching technique is adopted to solve the difficulty of stability analysis of the overall relay tracking system caused by the agent replacements of time-delay agents. Finally, the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed predictive control method for relay target tracking system with time delays are illustrated by comparative simulations.