Event-Triggered Formation Tracking Control With Application to Multiple Mobile Robots

In this article, we address the distributed event-triggered leader-follower formation tracking control problem of general linear multiagent systems with a dynamic leader in sampled-data settings. A novel locally computable state-estimate-based event generator is established for each follower agent to regulate the interagent communication at each sampling instant. Then, we propose a distributed formation tracking protocol based on the triggered sampled information such that the formation tracking control problem can be formulated as a stability-analysis problem of the closed-loop formation error dynamics. The event generator and formation tracking controller gains can then be co-designed using the feasible linear matrix inequality conditions that are derived from Lyapunov-based stability-analysis methods that guarantee the ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop formation error dynamics. Finally, numerical simulations along with experiment implementations were conducted for a group of linearized unicycle-type mobile robots to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.