Multileader Multiagent Systems Containment Control With Event-Triggering

This paper studies the event-triggered containment control (CC) problem of multiagent systems with a directed graph, where the followers’ communication graph is an undirected graph. A novel event-triggered CC protocol is presented to schedule communications between agents, which depends on both local states and control inputs. Different from traditional approaches using broadcasts, a unique property of the proposed protocol is that it enables agent-to-agent data transmission. To do so, each communication link is associated with a specific local event. The estimated relative interagent states are transmitted over a specific link only when the related input-based event is detected. We develop sufficient conditions to solve CC problem under this protocol and extend it to the adaptive event-triggered protocol that does not require the global knowledge on the smallest positive eigenvalue of the Laplacian. For both protocols, we derive positive low bounds on the interevent time intervals generated by individual events, which eliminate the “Zeno phenomenon.” Feasibility of the proposed algorithm is verified by an example.