Observer-based self-triggered control for time-varying formation of multi-agent systems

This paper studies the time-varying formation problem of general multi-agent systems with undirected topology via observer-based event-triggered control schemes. The distributed event-triggered control scheme and self-triggered control scheme are developed respectively. Each agent updates its next event time using current information without continuous communication in self-triggered control strategy. Formation error and state estimation error are considered simultaneously to get more accurate formation. Meanwhile, it is only when a request is received that each agent broadcasts its information. It is demonstrated that the time-varying formation can be achieved asymptotically under the two proposed control schemes and Zeno behavior can be excluded. Finally, numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed observer-based event-triggered control strategies.