Abstract: Output regulation has been one of the central problems in control theory and applications for a few decades. This problem not only needs to guarantee the stability of the closed-loop system, but also enable the output of the closed-loop system to asymptotically track a class of reference inputs and reject a class of disturbances. Thus this problem is more challenging than the stabilization problem. This problem can precisely formulate many complex control problems such as the vibration suppression of high speed trains, vertical take-off and landing of airplanes in a carrier, and robot control and manipulation, and is thus of practical interests. So far the output regulation problem is mainly studied via a centralized control approach. As the world becomes more and more interconnected, more and more practical control problems such as the coordination of a group of mobile robots, and the formation of a group of unmanned flight vehicles must be described by a multi-agent system. Therefore, in this talk, we will describe a framework for handling the output regulation problem for a multi-agent system. The core of this framework includes the establishment of the concepts of the distributed observer, and the distributed internal model. On one hand, we will show that this framework will set a stage for solving the asymptotic tracking and disturbance rejection problem in an uncertain multi-agent system via a distributed control approach. On the other hand, we will show that this framework contains many control problems of multi-agent systems such as consensus, synchronization, and formation as special cases, thus leading to a unified solution to several different control problems of multi-agent systems.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Jie Huang studied Power Engineering at Fuzhou University from 1977 to 1979 and Circuits and Systems at Nanjing University of Science and Technology (NUST) from 1979 to 1982. He got his Master's degree from NUST in 1982 and was a faculty member there from 1982 to 1986. He completed his Ph.D. study in automatic control at the Johns Hopkins University in 1990 and subsequently held a post-doctoral fellow position there until July 1991. From August 1991 to July 1995, he worked in industry in USA. In September 1995, he joined the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is now a professor and also the director of Applied Control and Computing Laboratory there. He served as a Science Advisor to the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and Honorary Advisor to Hong Kong Science Museum. His research interests include control theory and applications, robotics and automation, neural networks and systems biology, and guidance and control of flight vehicles. He authored two books and numerous papers. He received China State Natural Science Award, Class II, in 2010, Croucher Senior Research Fellowship award in 2006, and the best paper award (with Zhiyong Chen) of the Eighth International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics, and Vision in 2004. He is IFAC Fellow and IEEE Fellow. Jie Huang is / was editor, associate editor, guest editor of several journals. He was Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Control Systems Society from 2005 to 2008, member of the Board of Governors of IEEE Control Systems Society from 2006 to 2007. He served as general chair, program chair in numerous international Conferences.