Chapter 7
Consensus in Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems
Gentlemen can live harmoniously together even though they have heterogeneous characters, but non-gentlemen of the same character live in discord.
Confucius (551–479 BC), Analects of Confucius
Multi-agent systems (MASs) may contain heterogeneous network channels and/or heterogeneous agent dynamics. Even for systems with identical plants in agents, diverse input delays generate heterogeneous agent dynamics, and diverse communication delays result in heterogeneous network channels. Consensus problems in heterogeneous MASs are studied in this chapter. High-order consensus is defined for a class of high-order heterogeneous MASs. A necessary and sufficient condition is given for the existence of high-order consensus solutions to the considered class of systems. The condition shows that for systems with diverse communication delays, high-order consensus does not require that the self-delay of each agent to be equal to the corresponding communication delay. The frequency-domain scalability analysis method developed in Chapter 3 is applied to first-order and second-order MASs with diverse input delays and communication delays.
7.1 Integrator Agent System with Diverse Input and Communication Delays
In this section, we first consider the consensus problem for the integrator agent system with diverse input delays based on undirected graphs. Due to the heterogeneousness caused by the diverse input delays, the consensus problem of such ...
