On stability and controllability of multi-agent linear systems

Abstract

Recent advances in communication and computing have made the control and coordination of dynamic network agents to become an area of multidisciplinary research at the intersection of the theory of control systems, communication and linear algebra. The advances of the research in multi-agent systems are strongly supported by their critical applications in different areas as for example in consensus problem of communication networks, or formation control of mobile robots. Mainly, the consensus problem has been studied from the point of view of stability. Nevertheless, recently some researchers have started to analyze the controllability problems. The study of controllability is motivated by the fact that the architecture of communication network in engineering multi-agent systems is usually adjustable. Therefore, it is meaningful to analyze how to improve the controllability of a multi-agent system. In this work we analyze the stability and controllability of multiagent systems consisting of k + 1 agents with dynamics x¿i = Aixi + Biui, i = 0, 1, . . . , k