Abstract
This work investigates the connectivity preservation problem of multi-agent systems with event-triggered controllers. The agents in the system have only limited communication ranges, and they are required to achieve rendezvous while preserving the connectivity of the communication graph. To reduce the amount of communication packages, event-triggering mechanism is employed. We propose two kinds of event triggers to realize the connectivity-preserving rendezvous of the multi-agent system, i.e., the connectivity trigger to preserve the network connectivity, and the convergence trigger to drive the agents to achieve rendezvous. By introducing a particular constraint function in the controller design, the control inputs of the agents can be bounded throughout the rendezvous process. This guarantees that the controller can be physically implemented in practice. It is proven that the agent group will achieve rendezvous while all the existing communication links can be preserved under some very mild assumptions on the controller design. Moreover, Zeno behavior can be avoided by using an event/time hybrid triggering approach. The effectiveness of the proposed event-triggered control is illustrated by simulations.
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Recommended by Associate Editor Takahiro Endo under the direction of Editor Myo Taeg Lim. This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2018YFB1305804), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61973002, 61573021, 61773213), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20181298).
Yuan Fan received his B.Eng. degree in Automation from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2006, and a Ph.D. degrees in Control Science and Engineering both from the University of Science and Technology of China and the City University of Hong Kong in 2011. He was a research fellow in School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University in 2015, and a senior research associate in Department of Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong from March to September in 2018. He has been with Anhui University since 2011, where he is currently a Professor. His main research interests include networked dynamic systems, distributed control, multi-agent coordination, intelligent systems and control, and robotics.
Jun Chen received his B.Eng degree in School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering from Huainan Normal University in 2017. He has been with Anhui University since 2017, where he is currently pursuing a master’s degree. His research interests include rehabilitation exoskeleton control, event-triggered control, and intelligent systems and control.
Cheng Song received his B.Eng degree in Automation from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2007, and a Ph.D. degree in Control Theory and Control Engineering from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2012, and a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering from the City University of Hong Kong in the same year. He has been with Nanjing University of Science and Technology since 2012, where he is currently an Associate Professor. His main research interests include nonlinear control, multi-agent systems, distributed cooperative control, optimal control, and mobile sensor networks.
Yong Wang received his B.Eng. degree in Automatic Control from the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China, in 1982 and his M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in Navigation, Guidance, and Control from Nanjing Aeronautical Institute, Nanjing, China, in 1985 and 1999, respectively. He has been with the Department of Automation, University of Science and Technology of China since 2001, where he is currently a Professor. His research interests include fractional order systems and control, active vibration control and system identification. Prof. Wang is a member of the Motion Control Committee, and the Chair of the Fractional Order Systems Committee of the Chinese Association of Automation. He has published more than 260 refereed journal and conference papers. He leads several research groups focusing on vehicle control and vibration control supported by the National Science Foundation of China and the National 863 Project. He was the recipient of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Outstanding Instructor Scholarship in 2013.
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Fan, Y., Chen, J., Song, C. et al. Event-triggered Coordination Control for Multi-agent Systems with Connectivity Preservation. Int. J. Control Autom. Syst. 18, 966–979 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-018-0700-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12555-018-0700-y