Distributed output tracking via event-triggered control for nonlinear multi-agent systems.

[Display omitted] • A noval event-triggered control strategy is developed by integrating backstepping method and emulation method into the event-triggered control study the distributed tracking of nonlinear MASs. Compared with the single-agent system, the control design in this paper is more complicated since that its's necessary to consider information interaction between each agent. • The event-triggered control strategy saves more communication and computing resources compared with the periodic sampled-data control schemes. In addition, The introduction of event-triggering mechanism, on the one hand, leads to complex discontinuity of the system, which renders the analysis and synthesis of the MASs more difficult than MASs with continuous controllers. • The dynamic of the i th follower discussed in this paper contains N i integrators and nonlinearities, which is more general and more complex than linear MASs, and first-order and second-order MASs. The existence of nonlinear functions makes the design and construction process of event-triggered controller more complicated. This paper investigates the problem of distributed output tracking for nonlinear multi-agent systems via event-triggered control under a directed graph topology inspired by the advantage that event-triggered control can effectively save resources and the wide application of multi-agent systems. By backstepping and emulation method, the event-triggered control strategy is put forward, by which a series of event-triggered controllers and event-triggering mechanisms with absolute or relative threshold are designed. An inevitable problem on event-triggered control, called Zeno phenomenon, is avoided by guaranteeing a positive minimum inter-execution interval. We can see from the event-triggered control strategy that the closed-loop system has a unique solution and tracking error could be adjusted to arbitrarily small while ensuring the boundedness of all states. Finally, a numerical example is shown to verify the validity of the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]