Event-Triggered Connectivity-Preserving Consensus of Multiagent Systems Under Directed Graphs

This article considers the connectivity-preserving consensus for a class of multiagent systems under the event-triggered mechanism (ETM). By employing the topology hierarchical decomposition method, unnecessary communication interactions can be reduced. Each agent receives state information from one specific agent and sends messages to some other agents. A hybrid ETM is proposed to reduce communication costs and save computational resources for agents. Additionally, distributed state observers are designed to estimate the information of other agents under the ETM. Moreover, a novel connectivity-preserving error function is designed to maintain the connection between two neighboring agents. With the help of this function, a fully distributed connectivity-preserving consensus protocol for the considered multiagent system under directed graphs is proposed. The update of the protocol relies on the designed observer under the ETM. Finally, one example is presented to verify the efficiency of the theoretic designs.