Two Models of Latent Consensus in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract: In this paper, we propose several consensus protocols of the first and second order for networked multi-agent systems and provide explicit representations for their asymptotic states. These representations involve the eigenprojection of the Laplacian matrix of the dependency digraph. In particular, we study regularization models for the problem of coordination when the dependency digraph does not contain a converging tree. In such models of the first kind, the system is supplemented by a dummy agent, a "hub" that uniformly, but very weakly influences the agents and, in turn, depends on them. In the models of the second kind, we assume the presence of very weak background links between the agents. Besides that, we present a description of the asymptotics of the classical second-order consensus protocol.