Output consensus for networked heterogeneous nonlinear multi-agent systems by distributed event-triggered control

Abstract

In this paper, the cooperative global output consensus problem is studied for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems with a directed communication topology, where each agent has different nonlinear dynamics. A novel event-triggered control protocol with a dynamic compensator is proposed. By using Lyapunov theory, it is proved that the output tracking errors exponentially converge to zero under the event-triggered control protocol. At the same time, the states of all agents are not triggered synchronously, that is, whether each agent triggers or not only depends on its own state information. Moreover, with the unified frame work of the distributed event-triggered strategy, all the inter-event times are lower-bounded by a positive constant and the Zeno behaviour is excluded. Finally, some numerical simulation examples are given to illustrate the advantages of the proposed event-triggered consensus protocol.