Dynamic Event-Triggered Consensus Can Ensure Positive Inter-Event Times

Ensuring positive minimum inter-event times (MIETs) is of practical importance in event-triggered control. For multi-agent coordination, although it is widely known that dynamic event-triggered (DET) mechanisms are advantageous in saving communication resources, the existence of positive MIETs has not yet been theoretically established for DET mechanisms. Focusing on the consensus problem of linear multi-agent systems (MASs), this paper formally proves that DET mechanisms can ensure positive MIETs. We firstly revisit and/or design DET mechanisms for fixed-gain protocols and then extend the results to fully distributed protocols. Both node-based and edge-based DET mechanisms are constructed. Numerical results are finally presented for illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed results.