Analysis and Design of Multi-Agent Systems in Spatial Frequency Domain: Application to Distributed Spatial Filtering in Sensor Networks

This study attempts to analyze and design multi-agent systems in the spatial frequency domain and demonstrates that the spatial frequency-based approach is useful for distributed spatial filtering in sensor networks. First, we take the consensus of multi-agent systems (i.e., letting the states of all agents converge to an identical value) as an example and analyze it using the concept of spatial frequencies. We then show that consensus by typical controllers corresponds to lowpass filtering in the spatial frequency domain. This demonstrates that spatial frequencies can characterize the behavior of multi-agent systems. Second, we present a controller design method in the spatial frequency domain. The designed controllers provide the feedback system with a desired spatial frequency characteristic given in advance. We further derive a sufficient condition for the spatial frequency characteristic to ensure that the designed controllers are distributed. Finally, the effectiveness and applicability of our design method are demonstrated through an example of distributed denoising in a sensor network.