Distributed event-triggered consensus for nonlinear multi-agent systems subject to cyber attacks

Abstract This paper studies the distributed event-triggered consensus problem for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) subject to cyber attacks. Differing from some existing results for MASs, the case that communication topologies may be subjected to frequently cyber attacks is considered, which will destroy the communication links among agents and result in paralyzed topologies of the whole MASs. It is assumed that the attacks are recoverable and the agents have the ability to abandon communications when the topological graph does not contain any directed spanning tree. In order to reduce the update frequency of the controller, a distributed event-triggered controller protocol for MASs is designed based on the multiple Lyapunov function method to ensure that the global ultimate boundedness of the tracking error can be achieved. Moreover, Zeno behavior can be excluded. Finally, one numerical example is provided to validate our proposed scheme.