Dynamic Event-Triggered Formation Control for Heterogeneous Multiagent Systems With Nonautonomous Leader Agent

In this article, the time-varying output formation issue of heterogeneous multiagent systems is investigated by the event-triggered control scheme. Only the outputs of all agents, including leader agent and follower agents, are measurable. The leader agent contains an unknown input signal to generate flexible reference trajectory. Also, only a subset of follower agents have the direct access to the leader agent. First, for each follower, the leader-state compensator is designed to estimate the state of leader. Two kinds of dynamic event-triggered (DET) mechanisms, i.e., node- and edge-based event-triggered schemes, can be equipped on the compensator to save the communication bandwidth of leader–follower and follower–follower interactions, respectively. Then, the distributed formation controller is built to drive each follower achieving formation tracking. The presented control protocol consisting of the DET state compensator and formation controller is fully distributed, which is independent of the global information of communication topology, such as the eigenvalues of Laplacian matrix of communication topology and amount of whole agents. Finally, the numerical experiments and comparison experiments are exhibited to verify the effectiveness of the presented control protocol.