Distributed event-triggered adaptive control for second-order nonlinear uncertain multi-agent systems

Abstract In this paper, the event-triggered consensus control problem for nonlinear uncertain multi-agent systems subject to unknown parameters and external disturbances is considered. The dynamics of subsystems are second-order with similar structures, and the nodes are connected by undirected graphs. The event-triggered mechanisms are not only utilized in the transmission of information from the controllers to the actuators, and from the sensors to the controllers within each agent, but also in the communication between agents. Based on the adaptive backstepping method, extra estimators are introduced to handle the unknown parameters, and the measurement errors that occur during the event-triggered communication are well handled by designing compensating terms for the control signals. The presented distributed event-triggered adaptive control laws can guarantee the boundness of the consensus tracking errors and the Zeno behavior is avoided. Meanwhile, the update frequency of the controllers and the load of communication burden are vastly reduced. The obtained control protocol is further applied to a multi-input multi-output second-order nonlinear multi-agent system, and the simulation results show the effectiveness and advantages of our proposed method.