A Separation Signal for Heterogeneous Networks

© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Presented at the Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Urbana, IL, Oct. 2013.Presented at the Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Urbana, IL, Oct. 2013.DOI: 10.1109/Allerton.2013.6736532Organizing a large-scale, heterogeneous network of agents into clusters based on the agents’ class is a useful preprocessing step for cooperative tasks, where agents with the same capabilities need to be in the same location to cooperatively solve a task. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to apply an exogenous control signal to a heterogeneous network of agents, such that these agents form clusters of the same class of agents. We demonstrate that if each agent belongs to one of M “weight” classes and executes a weighted, forced agreement protocol, then it is possible to apply an external input signal that separates the network into M clusters corresponding to the M classes of agents