Distributed event-triggered flocking control of Lagrangian systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed event-triggered control method for flocking in Lagrangian systems, reducing communication by only transmitting velocities when necessary, and ensuring no Zeno behavior occurs.

Contribution

It presents a novel distributed event-triggered control protocol for flocking in Lagrangian systems with conditions to prevent Zeno behavior.

Findings

Effective flocking achieved in simulations

Reduced communication load due to event-triggering

No Zeno behavior observed in the proposed method

Abstract

In this paper, an event-triggered control protocol is developed to investigate flocking control of Lagrangian systems, where event-triggering conditions are proposed to determine when the velocities of the agents are transmitted to their neighbours. In particular, the proposed controller is distributed, since it only depends on the available information of each agent on their own reference frame. In addition, we derive sufficient conditions to avoid Zeno behaviour. Numerical simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed control law.