Distributed Control with Low-Rank Coordination

Abstract: A common approach to distributed control design is to impose sparsity constraints on the controller structure. Such constraints, however, may greatly complicate the control design procedure. This paper puts forward an alternative structure, which is not sparse yet might nevertheless be well suited for distributed control purposes. The structure appears as the optimal solution to a class of coordination problems arising in multi-agent applications. The controller comprises a diagonal (decentralized) part, complemented by a rank-one coordination term. Although this term relies on information about all subsystems, its implementation only requires a simple averaging operation.