Event-Triggered Consensus Control for Multirobot Systems With Cooperative Localization

In multirobot systems, the accurate localization of each mobile robot in the team is a prerequisite to reach consensus. This article investigates the problem of event-triggered consensus control for a group of mobile robots based on cooperative localization (CL). In our framework, each robot employs the position estimates from CL to jointly achieve consensus. An event-triggered mechanism based on a mixed-type condition is adopted in order to reduce the frequency of control updates and unnecessary transmission of information between system components. Our goal is to design an event-triggered consensus controller based on CL such that the closed-loop system achieves the prescribed consensus in spite of inaccurate sensor measurements. We provide sufficient conditions that guarantee the desired consensus using eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix. We design the controller and filter gains as well as the parameters of the event-triggering mechanism simultaneously in terms of the solution for a linear matrix inequality. Finally, simulation and experimental results are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approach.