Prescribed-Time Consensus of Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems by Dynamic Event-Triggered and Self-Triggered Protocol

This article proposes the dynamic event-triggered and self-triggered protocols to achieve the prescribed-time consensus of a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems with a trade-off performance. Firstly, a dynamic event-triggered control protocol and a time-varying parameter are jointly designed to accomplish the prescribed-time consensus. Secondly, a dynamic self-triggered control protocol is further designed to avoid continuous monitoring of the system states. The designed control protocols both can ensure the avoidance of the Zeno phenomenon and allow for dynamic adjustment between the specified time and the inter-event time. Specially, the minimum inter-event time can be designed as an arbitrarily large bounded constant when every agent is an integrator system. Finally, an example system is utilized to demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed algorithms. Note to Practitioners—Since this type of nonlinear system can describe the nonlinear characteristics in the system dynamics, some complex practical systems such as single-link manipulator systems and electrical subsystem dynamics system can be modeled as such systems. As control systems demand increasing precision, prescribed-time control, which allows for arbitrarily predefined convergence times, has been applied in many time-critical fields, such as missile guidance and emergency braking. On the other hand, in engineering applications, multi-agent systems are often constrained by limited communication resources. To address this issue, this paper introduces a dynamic event-triggered mechanism. Compared with general control strategies, the dynamic event-triggered mechanism can effectively conserve communication resources. Additionally, to avoid continuous monitoring of system states, a corresponding self-triggered mechanism is also designed.