A Fully Distributed Protocol with an Event-Triggered Communication Strategy for Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems Consensus with Nonlinear Dynamics

This paper presents the communication strategy for second-order multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics. To address the problem of the scarcity of communication channel resources and get rid of using continuous signals among the followers in lead-follower multi-agent systems, a novel event-triggered communication mechanism is proposed in this paper. To avoid employing the centralized information that depends on the Laplacian matrix spectrum, a network protocol with updated coupling gains is proposed, as well as an event-triggered strategy with updated thresholds. To eliminate the ill effects of inter-node communicating noise, relative positions are employed by the protocol instead of absolute positions. By a Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, it is rigorously proven that the leader-following consensus of MASs is achieved without Zeno behavior, under the control of the proposed protocol with an event-triggered mechanism communication. The effectiveness of the proposed protocol is verified through numerical examples.