Fully Distributed Consensus Control for a Class of Disturbed Linear Multi-Agent Systems over Event-Triggered Communication

This article is concerned with the fully distributed consensus control problem of a class of disturbed general linear multi-agent systems under event-triggered communication. Different from existing works, the disturbances considered in this article are more practical and complex. Each agent is subject to disturbances generated by exosystems and each exosystem is considered to exist with possible modelling errors. First, a local disturbance observer is designed for each agent to compensate potentially unbounded external disturbances to a bounded situation, but the value of this bound is not accessible because the upper bound of the modelling error is unknown. Second, an adaptive consensus control law with complete disturbance rejection is further proposed, by which the consensus error converges to zero over time. Third, with limited communication resources, an event-triggered communication mechanism is designed for deciding when an agent broadcasts information, which effectively saves communication resources while ensuring that the original control goal is achieved. In addition, it is demonstrated that Zeno behaviour is excluded. Finally, the correctness of the theoretical results is verified by a simulation example.