Fully distributed event-triggered formation-containment control for heterogeneous multi-agent systems with guaranteed positive MTI

Abstract

In this work, we address the event-triggered output formation-containment control problem for heterogeneous multi-agent systems with multiple leaders. The aim is to achieve formation of follower agents and containment of multiple leaders by designing fully distributed event-triggered control strategy, while the minimum triggering interval (MTI) is guaranteed to be strictly positive, which is a stronger condition than simply excluding Zeno behavior. First, an output feedback fully distributed control law is proposed. Then, a novel event-triggering mechanism (ETM) is designed by introducing an auxiliary function with time-varying coefficients. By means of the auxiliary function, the time it takes for the auxiliary function to decrease from given initial condition to zero can be imposed to be the MTI. Moreover, a novel Lyapunov function depending on the auxiliary function and error term is constructed for stability analysis and control design. Finally, the effectiveness of the obtained results is illustrated by simulation results.