A LOW GAIN APPROACH TO OUTPUT CONSENSUS OF NETWORKED HETEROGENEOUS LINEAR MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS

This paper investigates the output consensus problem of networked heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems. All systems have heterogeneous multi-input multi-output (MIMO) linear dynamics, and the relative measurement output of the systems, rather than relative internal state, is available through the time-varying network topology. The current setting makes the problem more practical but technically more challenging. The existing approaches cannot be applied to this problem directly. To overcome the technical challenges, a class of reference generators is proposed based on the low gain approach. By means of constructing multiple Lyapunov functions and designing the low gain parameter delicately, it is shown that output consensus of heterogeneous MIMO multi-agent systems without communication of internal state can be achieved.