Event-triggered nonlinear consensus in directed multi-agent systems with combinational state measurements

ABSTRACT Event-triggered sampling control is motivated by the applications of embedded microprocessors equipped in the agents with limited computation and storage resources. This paper studied global consensus in multi-agent systems with inherent nonlinear dynamics on general directed networks using decentralised event-triggered strategy. For each agent, the controller updates are event-based and only triggered at its own event times by only utilising the locally current sampling data. A high-performance sampling event that only needs local neighbours’ states at their own discrete time instants is presented. Furthermore, we introduce two kinds of general algebraic connectivity for strongly connected networks and strongly connected components of the directed network containing a spanning tree so as to describe the system's ability for reaching consensus. A detailed theoretical analysis on consensus is performed and two criteria are derived by virtue of algebraic graph theory, matrix theory and Lyapunov control approach. It is shown that the Zeno behaviour of triggering time sequence is excluded during the system's whole working process. A numerical simulation is given to show the effectiveness of the theoretical results.