First-Order Average Consensus for Cooperative Control Problems Using Novel Weighting Strategies

In this paper we show how average consensus can be guaranteed in cooperative control schemes for multi-agent systems, even when normalised or weighted Laplacians are used. First we present weighting strategies for improving the performance that can be applied in a distributed manner (only local information is used), based on a recently proposed importance matrix. Then we modify the first-order consensus protocol, such that average consensus is guaranteed. It is then shown how this scheme can be used to improve the performance of cooperative control schemes. For this purpose, the effect of a formation reference on the consensus states is explicitly stated. A simulation result with second order LTI agent models illustrates the proposed approach. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.