Dynamic Event-triggered Formation Control for Multi-agent Systems: A Co-design Optimization Approach

This paper studies formation control in general linear multi-agent systems where communication between the neighbouring agents is based on the fulfillment of dynamic event-triggering (DET) conditions. A novel co-design optimization is proposed to simultaneously design all required control and DET parameters. We use the flexibility of the proposed co-design method to optimize the inter-event interval for a predefined formation convergence rate. The optimization is based on the scalarization (weighted sum) approach which provides a structured trade-off between the formation convergence rate and intensity of the event-triggerings. Simulations for multi-agent systems consisting a class of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) quantify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.