Modal consensus, synchronization and formation control with distributed endogenous internal models

Considering a group of heterogeneous agents communicating over a network, this paper introduces the innovative concept of Distributed Endogenous Internal Model as the key tool for a novel approach to formation control, synchronization and (modal) consensus. The novel strategy yields a dramatic reduction in terms of required communications and computations: in fact, while the usual approach to the mentioned problems entails that each agent is endowed with an internal model of the dynamics specifying the desired collective motion, in the novel approach such dynamics is distributed over the network among the agents, and it is realized in an endogenous fashion, namely by a suitable interconnection among parts of the dynamics already possessed by the agents, through the local cooperation between each agent and its neighbors. To address the cases when the purely endogenous solution is not viable, the related problem of how to minimally augment the dynamics of the overall network of agents in such cases is also studied.