Preserving stability under communication delays in multi agent systems

The effect of time delays on the stability of a recently proposed continuum approach for controlling a multi agent system (MAS) evolving in n-D under a special local inter-agent communication protocol is considered. There a homogenous map determined by n+1 leaders is learned by the follower agents each communicating with n+1 adjacent agents. In this work both position and velocity information of adjacent agents are used for local control of follower agents whereas in previous work [1, 2] only position information of adjacent agents was used. Stability of the proposed method under a time delay h is studied using the cluster treatment of characteristic roots (CTCR) [3]. It is shown that the stability of MAS evolution can be preserved when (i) the velocity of any follower agent is updated using both position and velocity of its adjacent agents at time (t-h); and (ii) the communication matrix has real eigenvalues. In addition, it is shown that when there is no communication delay, deviations from a selected homogenous map during transients may be minimized by updating only the position of a follower using both position and velocity of its adjacent agents.