Event-triggered consensus of multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics and communication delay

Abstract This paper investigates the leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems with nonlinear inherent dynamics and time delays via event-triggered control and pinning control methods. The communication topology among the agents is characterized by a directed graph containing a spanning tree with the leader agent as the root. Based on measurement errors and an exponential decay function, we propose a novel event triggering rule which can not only avoid the continuous communication, but also exclude the Zeno-behavior. Moreover, each agent is required to be triggered only at its own triggering time instants. By using the properties of M − matrix and Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional method, we derive some sufficient leader-following consensus criteria in forms of LMIs. An example is presented to show the effectiveness of the theoretical results obtained in this paper.