Output-Feedback-Based Event-Triggered Control of Multi-Agent Systems Without Continuous Inter-Agent Communication

An output-feedback-based decentralized controller that uses event-triggered communication is developed for the leader-follower consensus problem. An observer is designed to estimate the state of each agent, and the estimated state is communicated to its neighboring agents for interaction. To eliminate continuous inter-agent communication, another estimators that estimate the states of neighboring agents are designed for control feedback and are updated via intermittent communication to reset increasing estimate errors. The communication times are based on an event-triggered strategy and are adapted based on the interplay between the control performance and the amount of reduced communication. The main contribution of the developed triggering approach is that inter-agent communication is not required to determine when a state update is needed. Since the developed control scheme introduces switched dynamics, analysis is conducted to indicate that Zeno behavior does not exist. A convergence analysis is also conducted to show bounded convergence of the developed control methodology.