Event-Based Consensus for Linear Multiagent Systems Without Continuous Communication

In this paper, we propose a new distributed event-trigger consensus protocol for linear multiagent systems with external disturbances. Two consensus problems are considered: one is a leader–follower case and the other is a nonleader case. Different from the existing results, our proposed scheme enables each agent to decide when to transmit its state signals to its neighbors such that continuous communication between neighboring agents is avoided. Clearly, this can largely decrease the communication burden of the whole communication network. Besides, since the control signal for each agent is discontinuous because of the event-triggering mechanism, the existence of a solution for the closed-loop system in the classical sense may not be guaranteed. To solve this problem, we employ a nonsmooth analysis technique including differential inclusion and Filippov solution. Through nonsmooth Lyapunov analysis, it is shown that uniformly bounded consensus results are derived and the bound of the consensus error is adjustable by choosing suitable design parameters.