The Connect Lab had a strong presence at the 2025 Israel Association of Automatic Control (IAAC) Conference held in Herzliya, contributing three presentations that reflect the lab’s broad expertise in coordination, control, and networked systems.
Each talk addressed timely challenges in multi-agent systems:
🔹 Fengyu Yue — Passivity Analysis for Nonlinear Consensus Protocols over Directed Graphs
Passivity theory provides a robust framework for analyzing large-scale and interconnected systems. However, its compositional properties break down in the presence of directed interactions due to the lack of symmetry. Fengyu introduced a novel approach using loop transformations and submanifold stabilization techniques to restore passivity-like properties, offering new tools for analyzing directed network dynamics.
🔹 Evyatar Matmon — Leader Identification in Semi-Autonomous Consensus Protocols
In networks with a mix of autonomous and leader-driven agents, determining which agents act as leaders is a fundamental problem. Evyatar presented a method to identify leaders solely through velocity measurements, leveraging structural properties of the network graph. His approach builds on relationships between the Fiedler eigenvector and relative tempo measures, offering a new perspective on observability in consensus systems.
🔹 Gal Barkai — Two-Degree-of-Freedom Architectures for Consensus Control
Traditional consensus protocols struggle to balance fast convergence with robustness to noise and delays. Gal demonstrated that the commonly used error-feedback structure is inherently limited in this regard. By introducing a 2-DOF control architecture, he showed how to decouple local and global control tasks—enabling simultaneous handling of disturbances, trajectory design, and performance shaping.
These contributions represent the Connect Lab’s ongoing commitment to advancing the theory and application of multi-agent coordination and control. We are proud of Fengyu, Evyatar, and Gal for their excellent presentations and the impact of their research.
