Event-triggered Coordination Control for Multi-agent Systems with Connectivity Preservation

Abstract

This work investigates the connectivity preservation problem of multi-agent systems with event-triggered controllers. The agents in the system have only limited communication ranges, and they are required to achieve rendezvous while preserving the connectivity of the communication graph. To reduce the amount of communication packages, event-triggering mechanism is employed. We propose two kinds of event triggers to realize the connectivity-preserving rendezvous of the multi-agent system, i.e., the connectivity trigger to preserve the network connectivity, and the convergence trigger to drive the agents to achieve rendezvous. By introducing a particular constraint function in the controller design, the control inputs of the agents can be bounded throughout the rendezvous process. This guarantees that the controller can be physically implemented in practice. It is proven that the agent group will achieve rendezvous while all the existing communication links can be preserved under some very mild assumptions on the controller design. Moreover, Zeno behavior can be avoided by using an event/time hybrid triggering approach. The effectiveness of the proposed event-triggered control is illustrated by simulations.