Event-triggered consensus control of linear multi-agent systems under intermittent communication

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel state-based intermittent communication mechanism to study the event-triggered consensus problem of linear multi-agent systems. The main feature of this mechanism is that whether the agents execute the control protocols is based on the current error state. In this communication mechanism, two frontier lines namely safety frontier and intermittence frontier are constructed to monitor the error state. On basis of this, a novel intermittent rule is proposed to arrange the work time and the rest time online with respect to the error state in real time. Then by utilizing state estimates of neighboring agents, a distributed event-triggered protocol is integrated into intermittent communication, under which the overall consensus of multi-agent systems can be realized. It is interesting to see that the events are eliminated during the rest time and the amount of samplings can also be reduced. Compared to the current time-based mechanisms, the proposed state-based intermittent communication mechanism has more tolerant of rest time. At last, a numerical simulation with two cases is provided to verify our results.