Distributed Output Feedback Consensus Control for Nonlinear Multiagent Systems Under Output Event-Triggered Communication

This paper focuses on the leader-following consensus control problem for nonlinear multiagent systems (MASs) under output event-triggered communication. A novel distributed discontinuous backstepping control strategy is presented, which utilizes information exclusively from intermittent output instants. First, a distributed adaptive event-triggered mechanism (ETM), along with a continuous-discrete time compensator and observer are designed jointly to compensate for consensus errors and reconstruct the system state, where all parameters designed are flexibly chosen. The triggering sampling instants are asynchronous and aperiodic, eliminating the necessity for continuous neighbor information monitoring. Second, we introduce a dynamic variable into the coordinate transformation to overcome the challenge of intermittent output in backstepping design, which is the key to address input errors caused by triggering mechanisms. Compared with the widely used backstepping method using the first-order filter to address intermittent signals, the proposed scheme does not require additional triggering design for the filter and achieves a full-state consensus in the global sense. Theoretical analysis shows that the system is asymptotically stable, all consensus errors converge to zero, and Zeno behavior is excluded. Finally, simulation examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical result.