Event-based leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems with switching topologies

This paper studies the leader-following consensus of multi-agent systems with general linear continuous-time models and switching topologies via event-based control technique. This topic arises naturally in real multi-agent systems with limited on-board resources. For each agent, the triggering function is defined to determine the triggering time instants and the controller updates are event-based, which are dependent the states of its neighbors and the activating topology. A necessary condition on leader-following consensus is firstly given and then a sufficient condition guaranteeing the leader-following consensus is presented under a state-dependent switching signal which is based on an appropriate partition of the state space. The Zeno-behavior of the closed-loop systems is excluded. Finally, a numerical example is performed to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.