Multi-agent consensus over time-invariant and time-varying signed digraphs via eventual positivity

Laplacian dynamics on signed digraphs have a richer behavior than those on nonnegative digraphs. In particular, for the so-called "repelling" signed Laplacians, the marginal stability property (needed to achieve consensus) is not guaranteed a priori and, even when it holds, it does not automatically lead to consensus, as these signed Laplacians may loose rank even in strongly connected digraphs. Furthermore, in the time-varying case, instability can occur even when switching in a family of systems each of which corresponds to a marginally stable signed Laplacian with the correct corank. In this paper we present conditions guaranteeing consensus of these signed Laplacians based on the property of eventual positivity, a Perron-Frobenius type of property for signed matrices. The conditions cover both time-invariant and time-varying cases. A particularly simple sufficient condition valid in both cases is that the Laplacians are normal matrices. Such condition can be relaxed in several ways. For instance in the time-invariant case it is enough that the Laplacian has this Perron-Frobenius property on the right but not on the left side (i.e., on the transpose). For the time-varying case, convergence to consensus can be guaranteed by the existence of a common Lyapunov function for all the signed Laplacians. All conditions can be easily extended to bipartite consensus.
Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure