Data-Driven Strategies for Modal Consensus and Output Synchronization

In this paper, a control design strategy to achieve modal consensus and synchronization in a multi-agent system is envisioned. The proposed solution relies only on input/output data locally collected by each agent and does not require any
a priori
knowledge of the underlying dynamics. Furthermore, while agreement on a prescribed
modal content
can be achieved for any generic initial conditions of the agents, it is shown that the synchronization task requires instead to address the problem of transferring, in finite time, the state of a system from an initial state to a desired terminal state in a completely data-driven framework. This control problem, interesting
per se
, is therefore tackled and solved here. The above concepts are then illustrated by means of numerical case studies.