Regulated State Synchronization for Homogeneous Networks of Non-introspective Agents in Presence of Input Delays: A Scale-Free Protocol Design (with a general MATLAB implementation)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable, topology-agnostic protocol for synchronized state regulation in homogeneous agent networks with unknown, nonuniform input delays, ensuring synchronization regardless of network size.

Contribution

A novel, scale-free protocol that does not require network topology or Laplacian spectrum knowledge, enabling robust synchronization in large agent networks with input delays.

Findings

Protocol guarantees synchronization for any number of agents.

Explicit delay tolerance bounds based on agent dynamics.

Applicable to homogeneous networks with unknown delays.

Abstract

This paper studies regulated state synchronization of homogeneous networks of non-introspective agents in presence of unknown nonuniform input delays. A scale-free protocol is designed based on additional information exchange, which does not need any knowledge of the directed network topology and the spectrum of the associated Laplacian matrix. The proposed protocol is scalable and achieves state synchronization for any arbitrary number of agents. Meanwhile, an upper bound for the input delay tolerance is obtained, which explicitly depends on the agent dynamics.