Event-Triggered Tracking Control of Networked Multiagent Systems

This article studies the tracking control problem of networked multiagent systems under both multiple networks and event-triggered mechanisms. Multiple networks are to connect multiple agents and reference systems with decentralized controllers to guarantee their information transmission, whereas the event-triggered mechanisms are to reduce the information transmission via the networks. In this article, each agent has a network to communicate with its controller and reference system, and all networks are independent and asynchronous and have local event-triggered mechanisms, which are based on local measurements and determine whether the local measurements need to be transmitted via the corresponding network. To address this scenario, we first implement the emulation-based approach to develop a novel hybrid model for the tracking control of networked multiagent systems. Next, sufficient conditions are derived and decentralized event-triggered mechanisms are designed to guarantee the desired tracking performance. Furthermore, the proposed approach is applied to derive novel results for the event-triggered observer design problem of networked multiagent systems. Finally, two numerical examples are presented to illustrate the validity of the developed results.

I. Introduction

In The era of the Internet of Things, smart devices are able to interconnect and interplay to link the physical world to the digital world [1]. The sensing, communication, computation, and control are integrated into different levels of operations and information. In particular, the introduction of wired/wireless networks to connect multiple agents leads to networked multiagent systems (MAS). The presence of networks improves efficiency and flexibility of integrated applications, and reduces installation and maintenance time and costs [2]–[4]. Since multiple agents are physically distributed and interconnected to coordinate their tasks and to achieve overall specifications, cooperative control of MAS has attracted numerous attention from various communities [5], [6]. The main challenge in cooperative control is how to design control schemes to limit transmission delays and packet dropouts to avoid the deterioration of the desired performances and to achieve an agreement for multiple agents by exploiting information from each agent and its neighbors. One attractive approach in this context is periodic event-triggered control (PETC) [7]–[9], combining time-triggered control (TTC) (where the information is transmitted at discrete-time instants [10], [11]) and event-triggered control (ETC) (where the information is transmitted only when the triggering condition is satisfied [12]–[14]). In the PETC, the triggering condition is evaluated with a predefined sampling period to decide the information transition, thereby resulting in a balance between TTC and ETC to avoid the continuous evaluation of the triggering condition [7], [9].