Reduced-order Consensus Controllers for Output-coupled SISO Linear Systems

In this paper, we continue the study of the consensus problem for multi-agent linear dynamic systems. All the agents have identical linear dynamics which can be of any order, and only the output information of each agents is delivered throughout the communication network. Under these settings, we show that the first-order and the second-order consensus problems can be solved by a first-order and a second-order dynamic filter, respectively. This holds even for high order dynamics, and therefore, the high order system does not have to use a high order consensus controller.