Consensus control for nonlinear multi-agent systems with low transmission and communication costs

This article addresses the consensus issue for a class of higher-order nonlinear multi-agent systems under directed graphs. A novel event-triggered distributed control solution is developed to reach consensus and ensure the boundedness of closed-loop signals. Compared with the current method, a significant characteristic of the proposed solution is that in each agent controller implementation, only a binary signal requires to be transmitted to the actuator, and only the output information of the neighboring agent is needed, resulting in a low transmission and communication cost. Furthermore, we exhibit that events cannot be triggered indefinitely within a limited time. Numerical simulations on the inverted pendulum ascertain the validity of our theoretical results.