Consensus control of linear multi-agent systems with distributed adaptive protocols

This paper considers the distributed consensus problem of multi-agent systems with general continuous-time linear time-invariant dynamics. Based on the relative output information of neighboring agents, two distributed adaptive dynamic consensus protocols are proposed, namely, the edge-based adaptive protocol which assigns a time-varying coupling weight to each edge in the communication graph and the node-based adaptive protocol which uses a time-varying coupling weight for each node. These two adaptive protocols are designed to ensure that consensus is reached in a fully distributed fashion for any undirected connected communication graphs without using any global information. A sufficient condition for the existence of these adaptive protocols is that each agent is stabilizable and detectable. The case with switching communication graphs is also studied.