Networks Of Linear Agents Research Articles

Seeking Consensus in Networks of Linear Agents: Communication Noises and Markovian Switching Topologies

The stochastic consensus problem of linear multi-input multi-output (MIMO) multi-agent systems (MASs) with communication noises and Markovian switching topologies is studied in this technical note. The agent's full state is first estimated by the state observer, and then the estimated state is exchanged with neighbor agents through a noisy communication environment. The communication topology is randomly switching and the switching law is described by a continuous-time Markovian chain. Then a consensus protocol is proposed for this MAS, and some sufficient conditions are obtained for ensuring the mean square and almost sure consensus. In addition, if the communication topology is fixed, some necessary and sufficient conditions for the mean square consensus can be obtained according to whether or not each agent in the system has parents.

Leader-Following Output Consensus in a Network of Linear Agents with Communication Noises

The leader-following output consensus problem of multi-agent systems (MAS) is studied in this paper. Each agent is modeled by a single-input single-output (SISO) system which can be further described by a controllable and observable linear state space model. An observer is constructed to estimate the agent's state, and the estimated state is shared with neighbor agents via the noisy communication channels. Similar to the previous work, in the proposed protocol a time-varying gain is employed to attenuate the noise's effect. However, in this paper, each agent is allowed to have its own time-varying gain. Some sufficient conditions on the time-varying gain are given for ensuring the consensus in the mean square sense. Finally, a simulation example is presented to verify the theoretical results.

Synchronization in networks of linear agents with output feedbacks

The problem is considered of asymptotic synchronization by states in networks of identical linear agents in the application of the consensual output feedback. For the networks with fixed topology and without delay in the information transmission, on the basis of the passification theorem and the Agaev-Chebotarev theorem, the possibility is established of the provision of synchronization (consensus) of strong feedback under the assumption of the strict passification of agents and the existence of the incoming spanning tree in the information graph. In contrast to the known works, in which only the problems with the number of controls equal to the number of variables of the state of agents are investigated, in this work a substantially more complex case is considered, where the number of controls is less than the number of variables of the state, namely: the control is scalar. The results are illustrated by the example for the ring-shaped network of four dual integrators.