DiscreteCommunication and ControlUpdating in Event-Triggered Consensus

TL;DR

This paper develops a fully distributed event-triggered consensus control framework that enables agents to update controls and communicate discretely without global information, using novel dynamic triggering functions and adaptive gains.

Contribution

It introduces a new framework for fully distributed consensus with discrete communication and control, featuring controllers with time-varying gains and dynamic triggering functions independent of neighbor information.

Findings

Proposed controllers work with undirected and directed graphs.

Numerical examples confirm the effectiveness of the protocols.

Framework accommodates output-feedback control scenarios.

Abstract

This paper studies the consensus control problem faced with three essential demands, namely, discrete control updating for each agent, discrete-time communications among neighboring agents, and the fully distributed fashion of the controller implementation without requiring any global information of the whole network topology. Noting that the existing related results only meeting one or two demands at most are essentially not applicable, in this paper we establish a novel framework to solve the problem of fully distributed consensus with discrete communication and control. The first key point in this framework is the design of controllers that are only updated at discrete event instants and do not depend on global information by introducing time-varying gains inspired by the adaptive control technique. Another key point is the invention of novel dynamic triggering functions that are independent of relative information among neighboring agents. Under the established framework, we propose fully distributed state-feedback event-triggered protocols for undirected graphs and also further study the more complexed cases of output-feedback control and directed graphs. Finally, numerical examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed event-triggered protocols.