A Suboptimality Approach to Distributed Linear Quadratic Optimal Control

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the distributed linear quadratic optimal control problem. In particular, we consider a suboptimal version of the distributed optimal control problem for undirected multi-agent networks. Given a multi-agent system with identical agent dynamics and an associated global quadratic cost functional, our objective is to design suboptimal distributed control laws that guarantee the controlled network to reach consensus and the associated cost to be smaller than an a priori given upper bound. We first analyze the suboptimality for a given linear system and then apply the results to linear multiagent systems. Two design methods are then provided to compute such suboptimal distributed controllers, involving the solution of a single Riccati inequality of dimension equal to the dimension of the agent dynamics, and the smallest nonzero and the largest eigenvalue of the graph Laplacian. Furthermore, we relax the requirement of exact knowledge of the smallest nonzero and largest eigenvalue of the graph Laplacian by using only lower and upper bounds on these eigenvalues. Finally, a simulation example is provided to illustrate our design method.