Distributed Safe Consensus Under Asymmetric Input and Time-Varying Output Constraints
2026-06-15 • Multiagent Systems
Multiagent SystemsRobotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors study how multiple agents can safely agree on a value while respecting limits on their controls and outputs. They develop a method that transforms outputs to ensure safety and design a controller working with both the agents' control limits and the network connections. Their approach guarantees that the agents' outputs stay within safe bounds and eventually synchronize to a chosen safe path. Simulations show their method works even when control limits are uneven and safety rules change over time.
distributed consensusmulti-agent systemsasymmetric actuator constraintsoutput safety constraintsbarrier functionsynchronizationforward invariancesingle-integrator dynamicsundirected graphscontrol theory
Authors
Abhinav Sinha, Shashi Ranjan Kumar
Abstract
This paper studies safe distributed consensus for single-integrator multi-agent systems over connected undirected graphs under simultaneous asymmetric actuator constraints and output safety constraints. Each agent is equipped with a continuously differentiable asymmetric actuator dynamics that maps a commanded control signal to the realized plant input while keeping the latter strictly inside a prescribed admissible interval. To address output safety, a barrier-coordinate transformation is introduced over a common time-varying safe interval, and a distributed synchronization law is designed in the transformed coordinates. The resulting controller integrates a graph-based coordination layer with an actuator-side tracking layer, thereby enabling simultaneous enforcement of input admissibility, forward invariance of the safe output set, and asymptotic synchronization. For compact admissible sets of initial conditions, it is shown that the closed-loop solution is complete, all signals remain bounded, the actuator inputs remain strictly within their asymmetric bounds, and the agent outputs remain inside the prescribed safe interval for all time. Moreover, the transformed synchronization errors converge exponentially to zero, and the original agent outputs asymptotically synchronize to a designer-selected admissible trajectory embedded in the common safe interval. Numerical simulations validate the proposed framework and demonstrate safe consensus under both asymmetric actuation bounds and time-varying output constraints.