Finite-time consensus of heterogeneous unknown nonlinear multi-agent systems with external disturbances via event-triggered control

Abstract

This article investigates the practical finite-time consensus for a class of heterogeneous multi-agent systems composed of first-order and second-order agents with heterogeneous unknown nonlinear dynamics and external disturbances in an undirected communication topology. To reduce the system updates, we propose an event-triggered approach. By defining auxiliary states, an adaptive distributed event-triggered control is designed to achieve practical finite-time consensus. Unknown nonlinear dynamics for each agent are estimated using radial basis function neural network. The stability of the overall closed-loop system is studied through the Lyapunov criterion. It is proven that by applying the proposed control scheme, the local neighbor position error and the velocity error between any two agents converge to a small region in finite time. Furthermore, it is shown that the Zeno behavior is ruled out. Finally, applicability and effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is verified and validated by two examples.