Distributed leader selection in switching networks of high-order integrators
Anastasios Tsiamis, Sérgio Pequito, George J. Pappas · 2017
We consider the problem of leader selection in a team of interconnected agents, modeled as higher-order integrators. The leader selection problem aims to determine the minimum number of agents, i.e., the leaders, that are required to receive an external input to ensure a control-theoretical property. The remaining agents, i.e., the followers, update their states based only on local information gathered from the other agents they interact with. In this paper, given the communication topology, our goal is to design distributed protocols that determine the minimum number of leaders and the communication protocol to ensure a desirable property, without any knowledge about the global structure of the network. The main contributions consist of determining the solution to this problem when the controllability and stabilizability are sought. In addition, we extend these results to the case where the communication topology switches over time. Finally, we illustrate the main results by providing a simulation example.