Distributed control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems with unknown control directions via event/self-triggered communication

This paper investigates the leader-following output consensus of heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MASs) with unknown and nonidentical control directions under switching topology. To save the communication resources, a distributed adaptive control protocol together with an event-triggered communication scheme is proposed to achieve the output consensus. A self-triggered communication strategy is further given to prevent the continuous monitoring of neighbors states. Moreover, we prove that the proposed event/self-triggered strategies are Zeno-free. The obtained results are successfully applied to design the output formation controller. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results is demonstrated by two numerical examples. (C) 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Franklin Institute.