Coupling effect and pole assignment in trajectory regulation of multi-agent systems

TL;DR

This paper explores how introducing coupling among follower nodes in multi-agent systems can improve convergence and transient performance, while also enabling pole assignment for better control over system dynamics.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach to induce coupling among followers and designs control laws for desired pole placement, enhancing transient performance in leader-following consensus.

Findings

Coupling among followers improves convergence behavior.

Pole assignment allows control over transient response.

The method enhances cooperative tracking performance.

Abstract

This paper revisits a well studied leader-following consensus problem of linear multi-agent systems, while aiming at follower nodes' transient performance. Conventionally, when not all follower nodes have access to the leader's state information, distributed observers are designed to estimate the leader's state, and the observers are coupled via communication network. Then each follower node only needs to track its observer's state independently, without interacting with its neighbors. This paper deliberately introduces certain coupling effect among follower nodes, such that the follower nodes tend to converge to each other cooperatively on the way they converge to the leader. Moreover, by suitably designing the control law, the poles of follower nodes can be assigned as desired, and thus transient tracking performance can also be adjusted.