Compositional design for time-varying and nonlinear coordination
Abstract
This work addresses the design of multi-agent coordination through high-order consensus protocols. While first-order consensus strategies are well-studied -- with known robustness to uncertainties such as time delays, time-varying weights, and nonlinearities like saturations -- the theoretical guarantees for high-order consensus are comparatively limited. We propose a compositional control framework that generates high-order consensus protocols by serially connecting stable first-order consensus operators. Under mild assumptions, we establish that the resulting high-order system inherits stability properties from its components. The proposed design is versatile and supports a wide range of real-world constraints. This is demonstrated through applications inspired by vehicular formation control, including protocols with time-varying weights, bounded time-varying delays, and saturated inputs. We derive theoretical guarantees for these settings using the proposed compositional approach and demonstrate the advantages gained compared to conventional protocols in simulations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.07226,
title = {Compositional design for time-varying and nonlinear coordination},
author = {Jonas Hansson and Emma Tegling},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.07226},
year = {2025}
}