Distributed output tracking via event-triggered control for nonlinear multi-agent systems

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of distributed output tracking for nonlinear multi-agent systems via event-triggered control under a directed graph topology inspired by the advantage that event-triggered control can effectively save resources and the wide application of multi-agent systems. By backstepping and emulation method, the event-triggered control strategy is put forward, by which a series of event-triggered controllers and event-triggering mechanisms with absolute or relative threshold are designed. An inevitable problem on event-triggered control, called Zeno phenomenon, is avoided by guaranteeing a positive minimum inter-execution interval. We can see from the event-triggered control strategy that the closed-loop system has a unique solution and tracking error could be adjusted to arbitrarily small while ensuring the boundedness of all states. Finally, a numerical example is shown to verify the validity of the conclusion.