A Passivity Analysis for Nonlinear Consensus on Balanced Digraphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a passivity-based approach for analyzing and ensuring output consensus in nonlinear multi-agent systems interconnected over balanced directed graphs, extending traditional diffusive coupling models.

Contribution

It proposes a novel passivity analysis framework for directed interconnections and reformulates the consensus problem as a convergence analysis on a submanifold.

Findings

Established passivity-based sufficient condition for output agreement

Extended analysis to directed, nonlinear multi-agent systems

Validated results with a numerical example

Abstract

This work deals with the output consensus problem for multiagent systems over balanced digraphs by passivity analysis. As the standard diffusive coupling structure only models the undirected interconnection, we propose a general approach capable of processing directed coupling and performing passivity analysis. To mitigate the complexity arising from the nonlinearity and directed interconnections, we reformulate the output consensus problem as a convergence analysis on a submanifold. We provide passivity analysis and establish a sufficient condition based on passivity for achieving output agreement in multi-agent systems over balanced digraphs. The results are supported by a numerical example.