Event-triggered cooperative control for uncertain multi-agent systems and applications

This paper investigates the event-triggered cooperative output regulation problem for uncertain multi-agent systems, demonstrating that the output regulation error of the uncertain multi-agent system can converge to a small neighborhood of the origin. The proposed method has several notable features. Firstly, both the leader and follower systems contain unknown parameters, and follower systems can be heterogeneous. Secondly, the controller only requires the relative output of each agent, rather than the absolute output or state. Thirdly, the controller is fully distributed, which implies that it does not rely on any global information. In order to achieve the above purpose, a fully distributed reduced-order observer is proposed with new adaptive laws. Furthermore, new adaptive event-triggered mechanisms are designed on the basis of the neighborhood regulation error (NRE) and the observational regulation error (ORE). Finally, the proposed approach is validated through simulation and experiment on a multi-joint robot manipulator.