Cooperative dynamic behaviors in networked systems with decentralized state estimation

Networked systems and decentralized control strategies have been widely investigated in the literature, with the objective of obtaining coordinated emerging behaviors by means of local interaction. While typical approaches aim at solving regulation problems (e.g. synchronization, swarming, coverage, formation control) a few works have recently appeared that move towards the solution of more complex problems, such as tracking of arbitrary setpoint functions. Based on the formulation introduced in [1], this objective is obtained in this paper partitioning the networked systems into leaders (that can provide control inputs) and followers (that are controlled through local interaction). In this paper we provide a methodology for letting the leaders estimate the state of the followers in a decentralized manner: this estimate is then used for control purposes. Simulations are provided for validating the proposed control strategy.