Impulsive Consensus of Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems via Edge Event-Triggered Control

In this paper, we mainly investigate two kinds of consensuses of multi-agent systems (MASs) with nonlinear dynamics based on impulsive control, event-triggered control, and sampled-data control. The two types of impulsive protocols are proposed for the case without and with leader agent. Edge event-triggered technique is presented, where for each communication link, occurrence of edge event can activate the mutual state sampling and controller update of the corresponding agents. The control approach combines the characteristics of impulsive control and edge event-triggered control and is defined as “impulsive edge event-triggered control.” It has good performance in robustness against disturbance and reduces the communication cost. The results with the aid of the Lyapunov function approach and stability theory of impulsive control show that if some sufficient conditions are satisfied, the consensus of MASs can be guaranteed and the rate of convergence can be exponentially estimated. Additionally, Zeno-behavior can be eliminated by using impulsive edge event-triggered control, which reduces the burden of event detectors. Finally, two simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness and performance of our theoretical analysis.