Event-triggered adaptive sliding mode control for consensus of heterogeneous nonlinear multiagent systems

In this article, we peruse the consensus problem of nonlinear heterogeneous multiagent systems (MASs) in the presence of uncertainty and external disturbances. A new event-triggered adaptive sliding mode control is first proposed to achieve consensus for MASs consisting of heterogeneous nonlinear agents with nonidentical inherent dynamics and different-order dynamics. It is supposed that the uncertainties and their derivatives are bounded, but the upper-bounds are unknown. For reaching consensus in heterogeneous MAS, the proposed controller integrates two fundamental actions concurrently. First, an adaptive sliding-mode control strategy is adopted to guarantee the robust finite-time regulation of each individual nonlinear, uncertain, and heterogeneous agent dynamics to the sliding surface and keeping on it despite the unknown model uncertainties and disturbances. Then, the decoupled heterogeneous sliding surfaces are designed to align the agent trajectories to a consensus through local interactions, when they reach the sliding surface. Also, by applying a novel event-based strategy, we facilitate the usage of limited resources of embedded microprocessors that actuate the controller updates. We propose centralized and distributed event-triggered schemes, in which each agent decides itself when to transmit its current state to its neighbors based on the global network information or only the knowledge of their own neighbors' states. Moreover, it is shown that the interevent intervals are lower-bounded by a positive constant, and Zeno behavior is excluded. In the end, by doing simulation, verification of the theoretical results are presented.