We are pleased to share that two papers from our group have been accepted for presentation at the European Control Conference (ECC), which will take place in July in Reykjavik, Iceland.
The first paper, “On two-degrees-of-freedom agreement protocols” by Gal Barkai, Leonid Mirkin, and Daniel Zelazo, introduces a novel distributed control architecture for multi-agent systems. The work departs from classical consensus protocols by leveraging a two-degrees-of-freedom (2DOF) design that separates local feedback from network-level filtering. This separation enables improved robustness to noise and disturbances, accommodates heterogeneous agents, and provides greater flexibility in shaping agreement dynamics. The framework is supported by theoretical analysis and numerical examples demonstrating enhanced disturbance rejection and noise attenuation capabilities. A preprint is available here: arXiv .
The second paper, “Fiedler-Based Characterization and Identification of Leaders in Semi-Autonomous Networks” by Evyatar Matmon and Daniel Zelazo, addresses the problem of identifying leader nodes in networked systems using only observed data. The paper establishes graph-theoretic conditions under which leaders can be distinguished via the Fiedler vector of a grounded Laplacian, and introduces a data-driven method based on relative tempo measurements to reconstruct this structure. The resulting algorithm enables identification of leaders without prior knowledge of the network topology, offering new tools for analyzing partially autonomous multi-agent systems. A preprint is available here: arXiv .
We look forward to presenting these results at ECC 2026 and engaging with the control community in Reykjavik.