Multiagent Networks with a Misbehaving Node: Control without the Knowledge of Global Network Objective

In this paper, we study multiagent networks that involve nodes exchanging local information through a fixed, connected, and undirected graph. In the presence of a leader node knowing the global network objective (i.e., the synchronization command) and a misbehaving node being subject to a disturbance, we focus on control synthesis to suppress the effect of misbehaving node in the multiagent network. Specifically, the proposed control architecture is applied to a control node based on the sensing information (i.e., state) received from itself as well as from another auxiliary sensing node, where neither the control node nor the auxiliary sensing node have to be the leader node. In contrast to the similar studies in the literature, the key contribution of our control architecture is that it does not rely on the knowledge of global network objective being only available to the leader node. Stability and convergence properties of the closed-loop multiagent network are also analyzed, where we reveal how the control node and the auxiliary sensing node need to be selected for suppressing the effect of misbehaving node in a certain portion of the multiagent network such that the nodes in this portion perform the given global objective (i.e., approach to the synchronization command of the leader node). Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed control architecture in a numerical example. Copyright (C) 2022 The Authors.