Event-Triggered Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems with Jointly Connected Switching Topologies

This paper considers the distributed event-triggered consensus control problem for neutrally stable linear multi-agent systems with jointly connected switching graphs. The switching nature of topologies coupled with event-triggered communications makes it troublesome to design distributed event-based protocols. We propose a novel event-based protocol that guarantees the achievement of consensus and the exclusion of the Zeno behavior. Compared to previous works which study event-based consensus for either fixed graphs or switching graphs connected at every moment, the main contribution of this paper is that the proposed event-based protocol can be used for general switching graphs, including fixed graphs as a special case. Another important feature, that the interval between any two triggering events is strictly positive, ensures the feasibility of the proposed protocol in implementation.