Fully Distributed Event-Triggered Cooperative Output Regulation of Multi-Agent Systems under Jointly Connected Digraphs

Abstract

This paper addresses the cooperative output regulation problem of heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems (MASs) with <i>jointly connected digraphs</i> under the assumption that the exosystem matrix is only known by the neighbors of the exosystem. First, a novel event-based adaptive distributed observer with time-dependent power functions as the event-triggering threshold is proposed to estimate the exosystem matrix and the exogenous signal simultaneously. A new analytical method based on the weighted mean-value theorem for integrals and Bellman-Gronwall lemma is developed to prove the estimation errors converge to zero asymptotically. Second, a distributed dynamic control law is proposed based on the event-based adaptive observer, and it is shown that the tracking errors of the resulting closed-loop system converge to zero asymptotically. Two distinctive advantages of this work are (i) the event-triggered control (ETC) protocol is fully distributed, and (ii) a positive minimum inter-event time (MIET) is explicitly given so that Zeno behavior is strictly excluded. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed fully distributed ETC protocol is illustrated by a numerical example.