An Impact Equivalence Principle of Separating Control Designs for Networked Heterogeneous Affine Systems*

In this paper, the new concept of generalized passivity is introduced to extend the concept of passivity to a dynamical system of any relative degrees and to quantify by a penalty coefficient the impact of its dynamics on the performance of its networked operation. It is shown that the knowledge of an upper bound on those penalty coefficients is sufficient to synthesize a network-level cooperative control and that, if all the physical systems are individually made to be generalized passive by appropriately designing their self-feedback controls, they can arbitrarily be placed at the nodes of a network-enabled cooperative control system. The proposed separation principle prescribes a completely modularized design methodology, and it unravels the complexity of analyzing and designing cooperative control of heterogeneous physical systems.