Synchronization of Frequency Modulated Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract: Oscillation synchronization phenomenon is widely observed in natural systems through frequency modulated signals, especially in biological neural networks. Frequency modulation is also one of most widely used technologies in engineering. However, due to the technical difficulty, oscillations are always simplified as unmodulated sinusoidal-like waves in studying the synchronization mechanism in the bulky literature over the decades. It lacks mathematical principles, especially systems and control theories, for frequency modulated multi-agent systems. This paper aims to bring a new formulation of synchronization of frequency modulated multi-agent systems. It develops new tools to solve the synchronization problem by addressing three issues including frequency observation in nonlinear frequency modulated oscillators subject to network influence, frequency consensus via network interaction subject to observation error, and a well placed small gain condition among them. The architecture of the paper consists of a novel problem formulation, rigorous theoretical development, and numerical verification.