Structural controllability of multi-agent systems

Abstract

In this paper, the controllability problem for multi-agent systems is investigated. In particular, the case of a single leader under a fixed topology is considered. In contrast to the existing literature on this topic, we assume that the graph is weighted and we may freely assign the weights. Under this setup, the system is controllable if one may find a set of weights so as to satisfy the classical controllability rank condition. It turns out that this controllability notation purely depends on the topology of the communication scheme, and the multi-agent system is controllable if and only if the graph is connected. Moreover, some simulation results and numerical examples are presented to illustrate the approach.