Consensus Control for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a distributed output feedback control method for heterogeneous multi-agent systems that achieves output consensus with local optimality and robustness, even with limited relative output measurements and minimal reference signal transmission.

Contribution

It introduces a novel consensus control algorithm leveraging SPR transfer matrices, applicable to heterogeneous agents with only relative output information, and eliminates the need for local reference models.

Findings

Ensures output consensus with local optimality and robustness.

Applicable to heterogeneous systems with limited measurement information.

Uses existing control design techniques like LQG and H-infinity for synthesis.

Abstract

We study distributed output feedback control for a heterogeneous multi-agent system (MAS), consisting of N different continuous-time linear dynamical systems. For achieving output consensus, a virtual reference model is assumed to generate the desired trajectory that the MAS is required to track and synchronize. A distinct feature of our results lies in the local optimality and robustness achieved by our proposed consensus control algorithm. In addition our study is focused on the case when the available output measurements contain only relative information from the neighboring agents and reference signal. Indeed by exploiting properties of strictly positive real (SPR) transfer matrices, conditions are derived for the existence of distributed output feedback control protocols, and solutions are proposed to synthesize the stabilizing and consensus control protocol over a given connected digraph. It is shown that design techniques based on the LQG, LQG/LTR and H-infinity loop shaping can all be directly applied to synthesize the consensus output feedback control protocol, thereby ensuring the local optimality and stability robustness. Finally the reference trajectory is required to be transmitted to only one or a few agents and no local reference models are employed in the feedback controllers thereby eliminating synchronization of the local reference models. Our results complement the existing ones, and are illustrated by a numerical example.