Formation tracking control with disturbance rejection in leader-follower multi-agent systems under dynamic event-triggered mechanism

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of time-varying formation tracking (TVFT) in a linear multi-agent systems (MASs) with external disturbance in a type of directed network topology, and proposes a formation control strategy in a leader-follower control framework with disturbance rejection under a dynamic event-triggering mechanism (DETM). Firstly, in order to improve the overall performance of the system, an extended state observer is used to estimate the status of the follower and the presence of external disturbance in real time. Secondly, a DETM is designed to avoid continuous communication between adjacent intelligent agents. And the formation tracking error between adjacent multi-agents is used to formulate a distributed TVFT control strategy. Furthermore, a compensation function is designed to actively offset the impact of time-varying disturbances on system. A Lyapunov function is then established for stability analysis, verifying the absence of Zeno behavior with this DETM. Finally, a comparative numerical simulation was conducted using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) cluster case to verify that the proposed method can save communication resources to a greater extent and has good control performance.