Solvability conditions and design for state synchronization of multi-agent systems

This paper derives conditions on the agents for the existence of a protocol which achieves synchronization of homogeneous multi-agent systems (MAS) with partial-state coupling, where the communication network is directed and weighted. These solvability conditions are necessary and sufficient for single-input agents and sufficient for multi-input agents. The solvability conditions reveal that the synchronization problem is primarily solvable for two classes of agents. This first class consists of at most weakly unstable agents (i.e. agents have all eigenvalues in the closed left half plane) and the second class consists of at most weakly non-minimum-phase agents (i.e. agents have all zeros in the closed left half plane). Under our solvability condition, we provide in this paper a design, utilizing H_∞ optimal control.