Event-Triggered Optimal Dynamic Formation of Heterogeneous Affine Nonlinear Multiagent Systems

This article studies an optimal dynamic formation problem for heterogeneous affine nonlinear systems. The nonidenticality in agents and the requirement for dynamic spatial reconfiguration make it a challenging task to coordinate different types of agents to maintain an optimized formation shape. In an architecture of event-triggered decision and control, this article investigates how to fulfill dynamic formation by distributively optimizing a team cost function. The basic idea is to design a decision unit for each agent to generate an implicit trajectory as a servo signal, based on which a control unit is designed with a displacement-gradient-based law to achieve the desired local solution. Typical heterogeneous characteristics including different nonlinearities and nonidentical dimensions are dealt with in a unified framework. It is shown that with the proposed triggering mechanisms, the optimal dynamic formation problem can be solved by a distributed control law with only intermittent communication. In theory, the properties of convergence of trajectory tracking errors, optimality of the team solution, and Zeno-freeness of event-triggered mechanisms are proved. Two simulation examples are given to verify the proposed method.