Distributed coordination in multi-agent systems: a graph Laplacian perspective

This paper reviews some main results and progress in distributed multi-agent coordination from a graph Laplacian perspective. Distributed multi-agent coordination has been a very active subject studied extensively by the systems and control community in last decades, including distributed consensus, formation control, sensor localization, distributed optimization, etc. The aim of this paper is to provide both a comprehensive survey of existing literature in distributed multi-agent coordination and a new perspective in terms of graph Laplacian to categorize the fundamental mechanisms for distributed coordination. For different types of graph Laplacians, we summarize their inherent coordination features and specific research issues. This paper also highlights several promising research directions along with some open problems that are deemed important for future study.