Privacy-Preserving Leader-Following Consensus via Node-Augment Mechanism

In this note, a node-augment mechanism is proposed to handle the problem of privacy preservation for a leader-following multi-agent system, where for each real node (agent) of the multi-agent system an associated virtual node is introduced. The real node and the associated virtual node form a directed node pair with the state information of virtual node sent to the real node, and information exchanges occur among virtual nodes of neighboring node pairs. It is proved rigorously that both the leader-following consensus and privacy preservation of real nodes' state are achieved by appropriately designing control protocol. Finally, numerical simulation shows the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.