Delay-dependent distributed event-triggered tracking control for multi-agent systems with input time delay

Abstract This paper addresses delay-dependent distributed event-triggered tracking control for general linear multi-agent systems. First, both fixed and time-varying input delays are taken into consideration of tracking consensus protocol design due to the network transmission delay among agents, respectively. Correspondingly, a new delay-dependent triggering mechanism is proposed, by which the protocols of agent are only updated at the violation of the pre-defined triggering mechanism. One of its advantages is that the triggering instant can not be affected by its neighbours’ state of last triggering instant, which can reduce effectively the frequency of control updates. Then, the co-design method of the control protocol gains and the triggering parameters are developed and delay-dependent event-triggered tracking consensus criteria are obtained by Lyapunov stability theory, respectively. Moreover, the Zeno-behavior of event-triggered mechanisms is excluded effectively by showing the existence of the strictly positive consecutive triggering interval. Last, two comparison examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed method.