Output feedback consensus for input-delayed nonlinear multi-agent systems via event-triggered communication

Abstract

This paper designs two periodic event-triggered control protocols to achieve the output feedback leaderless consensus for nonlinear multi-agent systems with uniform input delays, and leader-follower consensus with nonuniform input delays. The involved system permits uncertainties in input delays and inherent nonlinearities, which brings the challenge on the design of observers. To overcome this challenge, a compensator is constructed independent of nonlinearities and input delays for every agent. To guarantee the event-triggered communication among different agents, two new periodic triggering mechanisms are designed based on the discrete output information. Moreover, these triggering mechanisms naturally avoid constantly monitoring and the Zeno behavior since triggering conditions are only checked on sampling points. Specifically, the designed event-triggered output feedback control protocols achieve convergence not boundedness of consensus errors. Finally, two examples are listed to demonstrate the validity of the two event-triggered strategies.