Edge-wise funnel output synchronization of heterogeneous agents with relative degree one

Abstract: When a group of heterogeneous node dynamics are diffusively coupled with a high coupling gain, the group exhibits a collective emergent behavior which is governed by a simple algebraic average of the node dynamics called the blended dynamics. This finding has been utilized for designing heterogeneous multi-agent systems by building the desired blended dynamics first and then splitting it into the node dynamics. However, to compute the magnitude of the coupling gain, each agent needs to know global information such as the number of participating nodes, the graph structure, and so on, which prevents a fully decentralized design of the node dynamics in conjunction with the coupling laws. To resolve this issue, the idea of funnel control, which is a method for adaptive gain selection, can be exploited for a node-wise coupling, but the price to pay is that the collective emergent behavior is no longer governed by a simple average of the node dynamics. Our analysis reveals that this drawback can be avoided by an edge-wise design premise, which is the idea that we present in this paper. After all, we gain benefits such as a fully decentralized design without global information, collective emergent behavior being governed by the blended dynamics, and the plug-and-play operation based on edge-wise handshaking between two nodes.