Event-triggered communication mechanism for distributed flocking control of nonholonomic multi-agent system

Abstract

As the scale of multi-agent systems (MAS) increases, communication becomes a bottleneck. In this paper, we propose an event-triggered mechanism to reduce the inter-agent communication cost for the distributed control of MAS. Communication of an agent with others only occurs when event triggering condition (ETC) is met. In the absence of communication, other agents adopt an estimation process to acquire the required information about the agent. Each agent has an above estimation process for itself and another estimation based on Kalman Filter, the latter can represent its actual state considering the measurement value and error from sensors. The error between the two estimators indicates whether the estimator in other agents can maintain a relatively accurate state estimation for this agent, and decides whether the communication is triggered. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method for the distributed control of flocking in both Matlab and Gazebo.