Event-Triggering Sampling Based Leader-Following Consensus in Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems

In this note, the problem of second-order leader-following consensus by a novel distributed event-triggered sampling scheme in which agents exchange information via a limited communication medium is studied. Event-based distributed sampling rules are designed, where each agent decides when to measure its own state value and requests its neighbor agents broadcast their state values across the network when a locally-computed measurement error exceeds a state-dependent threshold. For the case of fixed topology, a necessary and sufficient condition is established. For the case of switching topology, a sufficient condition is obtained under the assumption that the time-varying directed graph is uniformly jointly connected. It is shown that the inter-event intervals are lower bounded by a strictly positive constant, which excludes the Zeno-behavior before the consensus is achieved. Numerical simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the correctness of theoretical results.