Distributed real-time non-linear receding horizon control methodology for multi-agent consensus problems

This work investigates the consensus problem for multi-agent nonlinear systems through the real-time nonlinear receding horizon control methodology. A scheme is developed to reach the consensus for nonlinear multi-agent systems under fixed directed/undirected graph(s) without any linearization technique. The problem of consensus is converted into an optimization problem and is directly solved by the backwards sweep Riccati method to generate the control protocol which is a non-iterative algorithm. Stability analysis is conducted to provide convergence guarantees. An extension to the leader-following consensus problem of nonlinear systems is presented. Several examples are provided to validate the effectiveness of the presented scheme.