Event-Triggered Control for Consensus Tracking With Relative Output Information

This brief studies event-triggered control problem for consensus tracking based only on relative output information. First, with the sporadic relative outputs, an event-triggered observer is designed to estimate the relative states. Second, based on the intermittent estimate, an event-sampled controller is constructed to achieve the consensus tracking. Compared with the existing observer-based protocols that are designed with absolute outputs to reconstruct each agent’s states, the current protocol is born to have two fascinating features. First, the relative states rather than agent’s states are estimated, and meanwhile no observer information is inter-exchanged through network. This structure can not only save communication resources, but also reduce the possibility of encountering cyber attacks. Second, the triggering instants associated with observer and controller are independent, showing that the updates of observer and controller are asynchronous. Numerical simulation illustrates the proposed control approach.