Fully Distributed Containment Control for Multiple Euler-Lagrange Systems Over Directed Graphs: An Event-Triggered Approach

This paper focuses on the distributed containment control problems for multiple Euler-Lagrange systems with stationary/dynamic leaders over directed communication networks. When the leaders are stationary, a distributed event-triggered adaptive control law is presented, and three other update algorithms of the time-varying control gain are further designed for comparison. Then, a distributed event-triggered neural-network-based control protocol is developed when the dynamic leaders are considered. The aforementioned two control strategies can be implemented in fully distributed chattering-free manners since no global information and discontinuous items are employed. In addition, the requirement for relative velocity measurements are relaxed in controller design. The update frequency and energy consumption of the controlled systems are effectively reduced by applying the event-triggered mechanism. It is rigorously verified that the proposed event-triggered control protocols will not be updated infinitely in finite time, which indicates that the undesired Zeno behavior can be ruled out. Finally, the effectiveness of the theoretical results is illustrated by some simulation examples.