Distributed Formation Control of Networked Multi-Agent Systems Using a Dynamic Event-Triggered Communication Mechanism

• Published in: IEEE transactions on industrial electronics (1982) Vol. 64; no. 10; pp. 8118 - 8127
• Main Authors: Ge, Xiaohua, Han, Qing-Long
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-10-2017; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Autonomous mobile robot; Communication; Communication networks; Communications systems; Comparative studies; Control stability; Data communication; Dynamic scheduling; dynamic threshold parameter; event-triggered communication mechanism (ECM); Feedback control; formation control; Model reduction; multi-agent system (MAS); Multi-agent systems; Multiagent systems; Multiple robots; Parameters; Protocols; Schedules; Symmetric matrices
• ISSN: 0278-0046; 1557-9948
• DOI: 10.1109/TIE.2017.2701778

This paper addresses the distributed formation control problem of a networked multi-agent system (MAS) subject to limited communication resources. First, a dynamic event-triggered communication mechanism (DECM) is developed to schedule inter-agent communication such that some unnecessary data exchanges among agents can be reduced so as to achieve better resource efficiency. Different from most of the existing event-triggered communication mechanisms, wherein threshold parameters are fixed all the time, the threshold parameter in the developed event triggering condition is dynamically adjustable in accordance with a dynamic rule. It is numerically shown that the proposed DECM can achieve a better tradeoff between reducing inter-agent communication frequency and preserving an expected formation than some existing ones. Second, an event-triggered formation protocol is delicately proposed by using only locally triggered sampled data in a distributed manner. Based on the formation protocol, it is shown that the state formation control problem is cast into an asymptotic stability problem of a reduced-order closed-loop system. Then, criteria for designing desired formation protocol and communication mechanism are derived. Finally, the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated through a comparative study in multirobot formation control.