Aperiodically Intermittent Event-Based Fixed-Time Consensus Tracking and Its Applications

In this paper, an aperiodically intermittent event-based control strategy is developed to investigate the practical fixed-time consensus (FTC) tracking problem of nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs). Different from the traditional event-based scheme, we incorporate the event-based scheme into the intermittent control mechanism, and the aperiodically intermittent event-based mechanism is developed, which can significantly save resources, particularly in terms of reducing the energy consumption of communication. Additionally, our proposed mechanism enables practical intermittent event-based FTC tracking for a directed graph, while eliminating the dependence on initial states for convergence time estimation. Moreover, the measurement error and intermittent event-based controller are constructed based on the hyperbolic tangent function, then the non-differentiable problem and Zeno behavior can be avoided. Furthermore, an improved triggering mechanism of the event-based scheme is designed to avoid continuous monitoring in control intervals. Hence, resource consumption can be further reduced. Finally, the multiple ground vehicles and Chua's circuit are considered in simulation examples to verify the effectiveness of theoretical results. Note to Practitioners - This paper addresses the FTC tracking problem of MASs via intermittent event-based control for a directed graph, which can be applied to multiple ground vehicles and Chua's circuit system. Unlike the asymptotic and finite-time stability results, the upper bound of the convergence time can be estimated, which is unrelated to the initial states and can better satisfy the application requirements. Considering the limitation of communication bandwidth and saving resources, we take the event-based scheme into the intermittent control mechanism, and a new aperiodic intermittent event-based controller is designed under the fixed-time convergence. Contrary to the traditional fixed-time control strategies via intermittent control or event-based control, the proposed algorithms in this study can effectively reduce the update frequency of the controller and significantly save energy under intermittent monitoring, which is more friendly for control engineers. The feasibility of the obtained results is demonstrated by examples of multiple ground vehicles and Chua's circuit. Potential applications of the proposed control algorithms include smart grid, cooperative search and exploration.