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

TLDR

The study develops a distributed formation control strategy for networked multi‑agent systems that operates under limited communication resources by employing a dynamic event‑triggered communication mechanism and a locally triggered formation protocol. The proposed mechanism features an adjustable threshold rule that reduces unnecessary data exchanges, casts the state‑formation problem into an asymptotic stability analysis of a reduced‑order closed‑loop system, and provides design criteria for both the communication rule and the formation protocol. Numerical experiments show that the dynamic event‑triggered approach achieves a superior trade‑off between communication reduction and formation accuracy, outperforming existing methods in multirobot formation control scenarios.

Abstract

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.