Scale-free Design for Delayed Regulated Synchronization of Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Discrete-time Multi-agent Systems Subject to Unknown Non-uniform and Arbitrarily Large Communication Delays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scale-free control method for synchronizing multi-agent systems with unknown, large, and non-uniform communication delays, using delay transformation and localized information.

Contribution

It proposes a novel scale-free protocol that achieves synchronization without requiring network size or topology information, even with large and unknown delays.

Findings

Effective synchronization under large, unknown delays

Protocol is scale-free and does not depend on network size

Applicable to both homogeneous and heterogeneous systems

Abstract

In this paper, we study delayed regulated state/output synchronization for discrete-time homogeneous and heterogeneous networks of multi-agent systems (MAS) subject to unknown, non-uniform and arbitrarily large communication delays. A delay transformation is utilized to transform the original MAS to a new system without delayed states. The proposed scale-free dynamic protocols are developed solely based on agent models and localized information exchange with neighbors such that we do not need any information about the communication networks and the number of agents.