Distributed adaptive consensus protocol with decaying gains on directed graphs

In this paper we present a distributed adaptive consensus protocol, that solves the cooperative regulator problem for multi-agent systems with general linear time-invariant dynamics and directed, strongly connected communication graphs. The protocol addresses the problems of recent distributed adaptive consensus protocols with large or unbounded coupling gains. These problems are solved by introducing a novel coupling gain dynamics that allows the coupling gains to synchronize and decay to some estimated value. Unlike the static consensus protocols, which require the knowledge of the smallest real part of the non-zero Laplacian eigenvalues to design the coupling gain, the proposed adaptive consensus protocol does not require any centralized information. It can be therefore implemented on agents in a fully distributed fashion.