Fully distributed adaptive asymptotical consensus tracking control of uncertain high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems with event-triggered communication

In this article, the distributed adaptive asymptotical consensus tracking control is considered for a class of high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems with matched unknown parameters under the event-triggered communication mechanism. The controllers, adaptive laws and triggering conditions are presented under directed topology with a spanning tree, relieving communication burden among the connected agents since continuous monitoring of in-neighbors is no longer needed. To handle the cross-coupling term associated with asymmetric Laplacian matrix and unknown parameters of all agents when the candidate Lyapunov function is defined in terms of local consensus errors, adaptive immersion and invariance control technique is adopted. Adaptive estimators are also designed to estimate the constants related to global information, with which the proposed control scheme is fully distributed. It is shown that all closed-loop system signals are globally uniformly bounded and all agents can track the reference signal asymptotically while ruling out Zeno behavior though a subset of the agents cannot have direct access to the reference signal information. A numerical example is illustrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed control protocol.