On leaderless and leader-following consensus for interacting clusters of second-order multi-agent systems

Speaker: Jiahu Qin

Affiliation: University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

Time: Monday 14/09/2015 from 12:00 to 13:00

Venue: Access Grid UWS. Presented from Penrith (Y239), accessible from Parramatta (EB.1.32) and Campbelltown (26.1.50).

Abstract: Abstract: In this work, we investigate the group consensus phenomenon for multiple interacting clusters of double-integrator agents in the presence of both cooperative and competitive inter-cluster couplings under two different frameworks, viz., the framework that all agents share the same position and velocity interaction topology and the framework that the position and velocity topologies are modeled by totally independent graphs. Both the case without leaders and the leader-following (meaning there is a single leader for each cluster of agents) case are systematically investigated. In particular, for the leader-following case, leaders are allowed to have constant or time-varying velocities. Different systems models, which are extended and developed from the complete consensus counterparts, are systematically analyzed accordingly using various different techniques. Theoretical analysis shows that for most cases, there holds a consistent structural result that the complete consensus for agents within the same cluster can be achieved if the underlying topology for each cluster of agents satisfy certain connectivity assumptions and further, the intra-cluster couplings, as compared to the inter-cluster couplings, are sufficiently strong. Some lower bounds for such strengths are explicitly specified as well.

Biography: Jiahu Qin received the first Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, China in 2012 and then the second Ph.D. degree in information engineering from the Australian National University, Australia in 2014. He was a Visiting Fellow with the University of Western Sydney, Penrith, NSW, Australia in 2009, and a Research Fellow with the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia from 2013 to 2014. Currently, he is a Professor with the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. His research interests include multiagent coordination and synchronization of complex dynamical networks. Recently he has been visiting the Centre for Research in Mathematics at the Western Sydney University.