New Event-based Control for Sampled-data Consensus of Multi-agent Systems

This paper investigates the sampled-data consensus problem of general linear multi-agent systems via new event-based control. Both the leaderless and leader-following consensus problems are considered. Different from the existing results, the state information is assumed to be unknown for each following agent and only the relative output information between neighbouring agents can be measured. A new Kx-functional observer-based output feedback event-based protocol is designed, which may have lower dimension than the full-order and reduced-order observer. The improved event-based condition bounds each agent's measurement error by a time-dependent threshold. Furthermore, the Zeno behavior is excluded by showing that the inter-event time between any two triggering events is lower bounded by a strictly positive value. Finally, a numerical simulation example is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control protocols.