Fengyu presented her work at the European Control Conference, held in Thessaloniki, Greece. Her work takes a fresh look at the classic tool of passivity theory, often used to analyze undirected networks, and extends it to a class of directed networks known as balanced digraphs. The results provide new insights into how stability can be achieved in nonlinear multi-agent systems with directed interactions — an important step toward a broader theory of passivity for directed systems.
Getting to ECC wasn’t easy — Fengyu’s route included stops in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and finally Greece — a journey that speaks volumes about her dedication.
Title A Passivity Analysis for Nonlinear Consensus on Balanced Digraphs
Abstract This work deals with the output consensus problems for multi-agent systems over balanced digraphs. While passivity-based approaches are widely used for analyzing undirected consensus protocols, we show that they are generally not applicable to the directed linear consensus protocol. To address this limitation, we propose a general approach that enables a passivity-based analysis for network systems with directed couplings. Then, we mitigate the complexity introduced by nonlinearities and directed interconnections by reformulating the general output consensus problem as a convergence analysis on a submanifold. Within this framework, we further focus on the stabilization problem, a specific form of the output consensus problem, and establish a sufficient passivity-based condition for stabilizing multi-agent systems over balanced digraphs. The results are supported by a numerical example.