Event-triggered attitude synchronization of multiple rigid-body systems

In this paper, an attitude synchronization problem of multiple rigid-body systems is investigated by using an event-based approach. The leader and followers are described by unit quaternions. A nonlinear distributed observer with event-triggered observations is proposed to estimate the attitude and angular velocity of the leader without continuous information exchange. The triggering mechanism is intermittent and asynchronous; and a positive lower bound of inter-event triggering times is given to show that Zeno behavior can be excluded in the intermittent communication sequence for any agent. Based on the estimated attitude and angular velocity of the leader, a distributed controller is synthesized for each follower to achieve attitude synchronization with the leader via intermittent communication. Finally, an example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.