A Passivity Analysis for Nonlinear Consensus on Balanced Digraphs

Abstract: This work deals with the output consensus problem for multiagent systems over balanced digraphs by passivity analysis. As the standard diffusive coupling structure only models the undirected interconnection, we propose a general approach capable of processing directed coupling and performing passivity analysis. To mitigate the complexity arising from the nonlinearity and directed interconnections, we reformulate the output consensus problem as a convergence analysis on a submanifold. We provide passivity analysis and establish a sufficient condition based on passivity for achieving output agreement in multi-agent systems over balanced digraphs. The results are supported by a numerical example.