Distributed Event-Triggered Adaptive Control for Consensus of Linear Multi-Agent Systems with External Disturbances

This paper investigates the consensus problem of linear multi-agent systems subject to external disturbances via distributed event-triggered adaptive control. First, a distributed event-triggered adaptive output feedback control strategy is proposed for each agent. It is shown that under this control strategy, the consensus problem can be solved for any connected undirected communication graph in a fully distributed manner without using any global information. Then a distributed self-triggered adaptive output feedback control strategy is designed with which continuous monitoring of the measurement error is no longer needed. It is further shown that for the proposed event-triggered and self-triggered control strategies, no agent will exhibit Zeno behavior. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed two control strategies is illustrated on a group of two-mass-spring systems.

I. Introduction

In the past two decades, multi-agent systems (MASs) have been extensively investigated due to their potential applications in a wide range of areas, such as rendezvous, formation, flocking, and sensor networks, to name just a few [1]. A large volume of works focus on the consensus problem of MASs, that is, to design a control strategy such that a group of agents agree on a certain quantity of interest (see [1]–[7] and the references therein). In practical MASs, external disturbances widely exist and affect the system performance. Therefore, it is of great importance to study the consensus problem for MASs in the presence of external disturbances. Due to various physical constraints such as wide spatial distribution of agents and constrained communication ranges, it is desirable to design fully distributed control strategies for MASs. In other words, each agent can only use the information of itself and its neighbors in the design and implementation of its controller.