Leader-Following Adaptive Tracking Control for A Class of Uncertain Discrete-Time Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems Under Event-Triggered Communication

This paper studies the leader-following adaptive tracking control problem for multi-agent systems comprising a leader agent and N follower agents with uncertain nonlinear dynamics. Specifically, a novel event-triggered communication based adaptive distributed observer is developed to enable each follower agent to estimate the leader’s information. Then, new forms of adaptive control law and parameter update law are designed with the estimated leader’s signals. The developed distributed adaptive control strategy has several characteristics: (i) With the introduced time-varying observer gain, the designed adaptive distributed observer eliminates the need for global graph information but ensures convergence of the estimates; (ii) By appropriately designing the event-triggered mechanism, the communication frequency among follower agents is reduced in the sense that the communication rate decays over time; (iii) The newly designed adaptive control law ensures a linear estimation error equation, facilitating the development of a stable parameter update law without requiring prior knowledge of uncertain system parameters. The stability of closed-loop system and leader-following asymptotical tracking are achieved. Simulation study demonstrates the theoretical results.