Event-Triggered Control for Weight-Unbalanced Directed Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces an event-triggered control method for weighted-unbalanced directed robot networks to achieve dynamic consensus, reducing communication and extending applicability to a broader class of directed graphs.

Contribution

It presents a novel event-triggered control strategy that guarantees stability using a logarithmic norm, applicable to general directed graphs, with experimental validation.

Findings

Reduces communication in robot networks

Ensures stability over unbalanced directed graphs

Validated through simulations and real robot experiments

Abstract

We develop an event-triggered control strategy for a weighted-unbalanced directed homogeneous robot network to reach a dynamic consensus in this work. We present some guarantees for synchronizing a robot network when all robots have access to the reference and when a limited number of robots have access. The proposed event-triggered control can reduce and avoid the periodic updating of the signals. Unlike some current control methods, we prove stability by making use of a logarithmic norm, which extends the possibilities of the control law to be applied to a wide range of directed graphs, in contrast to other works where the event-triggered control can be only implemented over strongly connected and weight-balanced digraphs. We test the performance of our algorithm by carrying out experiments both in simulation and in a real team of robots.