Disturbance-observer-based distributed formation control for multi-agent systems with dynamic event-triggered mechanism

This study investigates the distributed formation control problem for a class of multi-agent systems (MASs) under the dynamic event-triggered mechanism. For the sake of enhancing communication efficiency, the dynamic event-triggered mechanism is employed for each agent to schedule the signal transmissions between the agent and its neighbours. The aim of this study is to design a dynamic event-triggered controller that is of a fully distributed form for the considered MASs such that the desired formation is achieved. First, a disturbance observer is employed to estimate the external noise disturbances. Then, a disturbance-observer-based distributed formation control method is proposed to achieve the desired formation of MASs, and the controller parameters are calculated by solving an algebraic Riccati equation (ARE). Subsequently, it is proven that the Zeno phenomenon can be prevented. Finally, the proposed control method is applied to a multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (multi-UAV) scenario, and numerical simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.