Leader-following output consensus for strict-feedback nonlinear multiagent systems with edge-based event-triggered communications

This article investigates the leader-following output consensus problem for a class of strict-feedback nonlinear multiagent systems. Notably, edge-based event-triggered control is applied to the systems under investigation, which has not been considered in existing works. By introducing a time-varying gain, this article is committed to developing output feedback control strategies to achieve leader-following consensus while avoiding continuous communications among all agents and continuous updates of controllers. To this end, the event-triggered mechanisms are designed for all agents and all edges, respectively. Particularly, the edge-based event-triggered mechanisms, which possess positive minimum inter-event times, allow each follower to transmit information to its out-neighbors in an asynchronous way. It is shown that under the proposed control scheme, both the leader-following traditional and scaled group output consensus are achieved. A simulation example is provided to verify the theoretical results.