Self-Triggered Predefined-Time Consensus Tracking Control of Nonlinear Multiple Ground Vehicles

The practical predefined-time consensus (PTC) tracking problem is investigated for nonlinear multiple ground vehicles (MGVs) via dynamic event-triggered control (ETC) and self-triggered control (STC). For the PTC tracking control strategy, the expected tracking time can be pre-specified directly without over-prediction of utilizing the system parameters. Concretely, compared with the finite/fixed-time control, the upper bound of the convergence time of PTC is irrelevant to initial states, communication topology information, and certain parameters. Moreover, the magnitude of the initial control input is reduced when the difference between the initial states is large, such that the saturation problem will hopefully be eliminated in the PTC algorithm. Then, the dynamic ETC is proposed by introducing the internal variables to reduce the triggering times further. Subsequently, the STC scheme is presented to exclude continuous monitoring, including self-state monitoring, which reduces energy consumption to a great extent. Furthermore, both the triggering strategies can avoid Zeno behavior. Finally, a numerical example is illustrated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.