Global and invariant aspects of consensus on the n-sphere

peer reviewedThis paper concerns two aspects of the multi- agent consensus problem on the n-sphere. Firstly, it proves that a standard consensus protocol, in a certain sense, yields asymptotical stability on a global level for a nontrivial class of graph topologies. Secondly, it provides a novel consensus protocol that leaves the centroid of agent states in Rn+1 projected back to the sphere invariant. It hence becomes possible to determine the consensus point as a function of the initial states. Much of the stability analysis has an intuitive geometric appeal since it is based on the symmetries of the n-sphere rather than generic Lyapunov theory