Controllability of multi-agent dynamical systems with a broadcasting control signal

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the controllability of a multi-agent dynamical system in which all identical first-order dynamical agents receive a common exogenous control signal in addition to their inter-agent communications. Existing graph theoretic results are used to determine conditions for controllability, and to study the dependency of controllability on the size of network and the number of connections. The fragility of controllability in the presence of hidden or broken connections is also investigated. © 2013 Chinese Automatic Control Society and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.