The focus of this thesis is to study distributed event-triggered
control for multi-agent systems (MASs) facing constraints in
practical applications. We consider several problems in the
field, ranging from event-triggered consensus with information
quantization, event-triggered edge agreement under
synchronized/unsynchronized clocks, event-triggered
leader-follower consensus with Euler-Lagrange agent dynamics and
cooperative event-triggered rigid formation control.
The first topic is named as event-triggered consensus with
quantized relative state measurements. In this topic, we develop
two event-triggered controllers with quantized relative state
measurements to achieve consensus for an undirected network where
each agent is modelled by single integrator dynamics. Both
uniform and logarithmic quantizers are considered, which,
together with two different controllers, yield four cases of
study in this topic. The quantized information is used to update
the control input as well as to determine the next trigger event.
We show that approximate consensus can be achieved by the
proposed algorithms and Zeno behaviour can be completely excluded
if constant offsets with some computable lower bounds are added
to the trigger conditions.
The second topic considers event-triggered edge agreement
problems. Two cases, namely the synchronized clock case and the
unsynchronized clock case, are studied. In the synchronized clock
case, all agents are activated simultaneously to measure the
relative state information over edge links under a global clock.
Edge events are defined and their occurrences trigger the update
of control inputs for the two agents sharing the link. We show
that average consensus can be achieved with our proposed
algorithm. In the unsynchronized clock case, each agent executes
control algorithms under its own clock which is not synchronized
with other agents' clocks. An edge event only triggers control
input update for an individual agent. It is shown that all agents
will reach consensus in a totally asynchronous manner.
In the third topic, we propose three different distributed
event-triggered control algorithms to achieve leader-follower
consensus for a network of Euler-Lagrange agents. We firstly
propose two model-independent algorithms for a subclass of
Euler-Lagrange agents without the vector of gravitational
potential forces. A variable-gain algorithm is employed when the
sensing graph is undirected; algorithm parameters are selected in
a fully distributed manner with much greater flexibility compared
to all previous work concerning event-triggered consensus
problems. When the sensing graph is directed, a constant-gain
algorithm is employed. The control gains must be centrally
designed to exceed several lower bounding inequalities which
require limited knowledge of bounds on the matrices describing
the agent dynamics, bounds on network topology information and
bounds on the initial conditions. When the Euler-Lagrange agents
have dynamics which include the vector of gravitational potential
forces, an adaptive algorithm is proposed. This requires more
information about the agent dynamics but allows for the
estimation of uncertain agent parameters.
The last topic discusses cooperative stabilization control of
rigid formations via an event-triggered approach. We first design
a centralized event-triggered formation control system, in which
a central event controller determines the next triggering time
and broadcasts the event signal to all the agents for control
input update. We then build on this approach to propose a
distributed event control strategy, in which each agent can use
its local event trigger and local information to update the
control input at its own event time. For both cases, the trigger
condition, event function and trigger behaviour are discussed in
detail, and the exponential convergence of the formation system
is guaranteed
