A governor approach for consensus of heterogeneous systems with constraints under a switching network

Abstract This work aims to achieve output consensus among heterogeneous agents in a multi-agent environment where each agent is subject to state and/or control constraints. The communication among agents is described by a directed graph that switches with time. Past works in this direction are much fewer than the constraint-free case and most results are restricted to the case where the agents are homogeneous. The management of the constraints is done in two stages: one in which the reference trajectories of all agents reach consensus and the second is based on the reference/command governor approach, implemented on controllers designed based on the internal model principle. In the case where the system dynamics of all agents are stable, this work shows a scheme that achieves global convergence towards the consensus values. Two examples are provided to illustrate the possibilities of the approach.