Consensus Controller for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems Using Output Prediction

This letter proposes a distributed consensus controller for a class of heterogeneous nonlinear multi-agent systems. The control law enacted at each agent is based on predicted outputs of itself and its neighboring agents. It implements a fluid-flow version of the Newton-Raphson method for solving equations, and this, together with the way the predictions are used, guarantees asymptotic consensus for a general class of systems defined by ordinary differential equations. The scope of the analysis includes heterogeneous systems whose agent-subsystems have different state-space models with different dimensions, but it requires that all the inputs and outputs of the agents’ subsystems have the same dimension. Following a presentation of the consensus-control technique, we analyse its convergence and present simulation results for a heterogeneous nonlinear system.