A Hybrid Systems Approach to Consensus of Nonlinear Multi-agent Systems With Self-triggered Output Feedback Control

This paper develops a hybrid systems approach to address the self-triggered leader-following consensus problem of nonlinear multi-agent systems. First, a distributed dynamic output feedback consensus control protocol is proposed, and a novel hybrid dynamic self-triggering mechanism (HDSTM), which can provide a pre-designable minimum triggering interval (MITI) for the adjacent events, is developed to reduce the usage of communication resources. Then, by means of internal variables, a hybrid model, including both flow and jump dynamics, is constructed to describe the closed-loop dynamics. Based on this hybrid model, Lyapunov-based consensus analysis and HDSTM design results are derived. Compared to the existing related works, the main superiority of the proposed approach is that the inter-event communication intervals can always be computed in advance and no less than the given MITI. Finally, a numerical example is provided to show the effectiveness.