On the Stability of Consensus Control Under Rotational Ambiguities

Consensus control of multiagent systems arises in various applications such as rendezvous and formation control. The input to these algorithms e.g., the (relative) positions of neighboring agents need to be measured using various sensors. Recent works aim to reconstruct these positions i.e., achieve localization using Euclidean distance measurements instead of displacements, for cost efficiency and scalability. However, this approach inherently introduces ambiguities, such as a rotation or a reflection, which can cause stability issues in practice without corrections by some anchors. In this work, we conduct a thorough analysis of the stability of consensus control in the presence of localization-induced rotational ambiguities, in several scenarios including e.g., proper and improper rotation, and the homogeneity of rotations. We give stability criteria and stability margin on the rotations, which are numerically verified with two traditional examples of consensus control.