Event‐triggered consensus with guaranteed ‐gain in networks with directed topologies

Abstract

The study addresses the consensus problem for multi-agent systems (MASs) with directed topologies by proposing an event-triggered control approach which can reduce the control input actuations, communication network usage and computing resources utilisation meanwhile maintains a desirable disturbance rejection performance. For each agent, a local event-triggering mechanism (ETM) checks the violation of a pre-designed triggering condition periodically to determine the triggering instants. Each agent broadcasts data to the neighbours whenever an event is triggered by its local ETM. Thereby, continuous-time communications between agents are avoided. Besides, the event-based control input of each agent is updated just at its own triggering instants and remains constant between trigger times which extends the lifespan of the agent actuators and facilitates more energy saving. It is further theoretically proved that the MAS with the proposed event-based controller maintains a desirable finite -gain performance index against the time-varying external disturbances in -space. Illustrative examples are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.