Dynamic event‐triggered strategies for tracking control of directed multi‐agent systems with Lipschitz nonlinear dynamics

Abstract This article considers synchronization of Lipschitz nonlinear multi‐agent systems under dynamic event‐triggered mechanisms in a directed network. To achieve synchronization with less requirement of communications, a distributed event‐triggered state feedback control protocol as well as corresponding dynamic event‐triggered mechanism are proposed in a directed network, where the designed dynamic event‐triggered mechanism can boil down to existing static triggering mechanisms as special examples. Then, our scheme is extended to design an observer‐based event‐triggered protocol and a dynamic triggering law when the system states are unmeasurable. It is shown that the proposed dynamic event‐triggered mechanisms can not only guarantee synchronization of Lipschitz nonlinear multi‐agent systems with Zeno‐freeness, but also avoid continuous communications among agents. Moreover, by comparing the static and dynamic trigger mechanisms, it proves that the minimum inter‐execution time of the dynamic trigger mechanism cannot be smaller than that of the static case. Finally, two numerical examples are given to verify the theoretical analysis.