Leaderless state synchronization of homogeneous multi-agent systems via a universal adaptive nonlinear dynamic protocol

This paper studies leaderless state synchronization of continuous-time homogeneous multi-agent systems (MAS) with identical general linear agents. The communication network is with full-state coupling, or partial-state coupling but with additional information exchange. We assume that the communication topology is completely unknown and undirected. An adaptive nonlinear dynamic protocol design is presented to achieve leaderless state synchronization for a MAS. For the full-state coupling case, the protocol design is based on two methods. One is algebraic Riccati equation (ARE) method, and the other is asymptotic time-scale eigenstructure assignment (ATEA) method. We show that the adaptive nonlinear dynamic protocol is universal and does not depend on any information of communication topology such as lower bound of non-zero eigenvalue for the Laplacian matrix associated with the communication topology and the number of agents.

1 Introduction

The synchronization problem of multi-agent systems (MAS) has attracted substantial attention during the past decade, due to the wide potential for applications in several areas such as automotive vehicle control, satellites/robots formation, sensor networks, and so on. See for instance the books [10] and [20] or the survey paper [6].