Distributed Event-Triggered Tracking Control of Heterogeneous Discrete-Time Multi-Agent Systems with Unknown Parameters

In this paper, a novel design framework is developed to solve the cooperative tracking problem of heterogeneous discrete-time multi-agent systems with unknown agent parameters and directed communication topologies. First, a distributed event-triggered observer is developed to handle the heterogeneity of the multi-agent systems. An event-triggering mechanism is proposed to reduce the amount of data transmission between neighboring agents. Then, based on the proposed observer, a discrete-time distributed model reference adaptive controller is presented to deal with the unknown parameters of the multi-agent systems. It is shown that by using the proposed observer and the model reference adaptive controller, the proposed design framework could achieve output tracking of the unknown multi-agent systems for any communication graph containing a directed spanning tree. Finally, an example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.