Leader-Following Output Consensus for High-Order Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems by Distributed Event-Triggered Strategy via Sampled Data Information

In this paper, the observer-based leader-following output consensus problem is investigated for high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems with a distributed event-triggered mechanism. The system dynamics are described as a strict-feedback form and satisfy the Lipschitz condition. Both the event-triggered communication scheme and the sampled-based communication scheme are considered to solve the output consensus problem. First, a distributed event-triggered strategy is developed by using the dynamic output-feedback control method for the event-triggered communication scheme. With the complicated event-triggered strategy, some critical techniques are used to achieve that all the sampling intervals have a positive lower bound. Thus, Zeno behavior is excluded. Then, an event-triggered output consensus protocol is proposed with a sampled-based monitoring scheme, where the monitoring instants only happen at the sampling instants. By using the Lyapunov stability theorem, it is proved that all the output tracking errors converge to zero exponentially when the design parameters are chosen properly for both these two cases. Also, we get that it does not need all agents to be triggered synchronously. Finally, the two simulation examples are considered to show the efficiency of the consensus protocols.