Distributed consensus protocol design for general linear multi-agent systems: a consensus region approach

This study presents a consensus region approach to designing distributed consensus protocols for multi-agent systems with general continuous-time linear node dynamics. The consensus region approach has a favourable decoupling feature, which decouples the design of the feedback gain matrices of the consensus protocols from the communication graph. Multi-step algorithms are presented to construct the fixed-gain consensus protocols, which requires the smallest non-zero eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix. To remove this limitation, distributed adaptive protocols with time-varying coupling weights are designed for the cases with undirected and directed graphs, which can be implemented in a fully distributed fashion. The robustness issue of the adaptive protocols in the presence of external disturbances is also discussed. For the case where there exists a leader of bounded unknown control input, distributed discontinuous and continuous controllers are designed to solve the distributed tracking problem.