Event-Triggered Distributed Consensus Tracking for Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems: A Minimal Approximation Approach

In this paper, a minimal-approximation-based event-triggered leader-following consensus control scheme is proposed for nonlinear multi-agent systems with unknown actuator dead-zone. To save communication resources, a distributed consensus controller based on the event-sampled states is designed for each follower, which reduces the number of transmissions in the sensor-to-controller and controller-to-actuator channels. Considering that a large number of function approximators are employed in the existing distributed event-triggered schemes of uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems, thereby consuming massive computational resources. The minimal approximation technology, i.e., designing un-requirement-calculated virtual control laws and employing one function approximator in each local controller, is introduced in our proposed scheme. Meanwhile, the proposed minimal-approximation-based event-triggering mechanism only needs to monitor one triggering condition for each follower, which further reduces the computational burden. Finally, the stability of the closed-loop system is strictly proven by using the Lyapunov extension theorem, and two examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.