Event-triggered formation-containment control for multi-agent systems based on sliding mode control approaches

In this article, event-triggered (ET) formation-containment control is profoundly investigated for discrete-time multi-agent systems (DT-MASs) in the framework of sliding mode control (SMC). The ET mechanism is utilized to effectively relieve the communication burden and SMC is employed to reliably handle the matching disturbances to enhance the control performance. According to this task, a novel ET controller based on SMC is constructed to ensure that a desired formation shape (i.e. a convex hull) is definitely formed by all leaders, and involves the trajectories of all followers. Then, sufficient conditions to solve the desired controller settings are deduced with the aid of the feature of Laplacian matrices as well as some essential inequality techniques. Furthermore, the reachability of constructed sliding surfaces is systematically revealed and the predetermined manifold is reachable in finite time. Finally, the efficiency of the designed control rule is verified with simulation examples.