Consensus of heterogeneous linear agents applied to a formation control problem

Robustness to dynamic uncertainty is considered for consensus algorithms. The purpose of such algorithms is to use distributed control to reach an agreement regarding a certain quantity of interest that depends on the state of all systems. In distinction to the standard consensus problem where the dynamics of all individual agents are the same and of low dimension, the convergence criterion now depends on the full spectrum of the communication graph and not only the largest nonzero eigenvalue. The new consensus criterion is posed as an inverse Nyquist criterion that provides a clear separation between the individual dynamics and the spectrum of the graph. A formation control problem for a target encircling task is considered as an application.