Adaptive Event-Triggered Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems in Sense of Asymptotic Convergence.

In this paper, the asymptotic consensus control of multi-agent systems with general linear agent dynamics is investigated. A neighbor-based adaptive event-triggering strategy with a dynamic triggering threshold is proposed, which leads to a fully distributed control of the multi-agent system, depending only on the states of the neighboring agents at triggering moments. By using the Lyapunov method, we prove that the states of the agents converge asymptotically. In addition, the proposed event-triggering strategy is proven to exclude Zeno behavior. The numerical simulation results illustrate that the agent states achieve consensus in sense of asymptotic convergence. Furthermore, the proposed strategy is shown to be scalable in case of variable agent numbers.

Predefined-Time Adaptive Neural Tracking Control for a Single Link Manipulator with an Event-Triggered Mechanism.

This paper introduces an adaptive trajectory-tracking control method for uncertain nonlinear systems, leveraging a time-varying threshold event-triggered mechanism to achieve predefined-time tracking. Compared to conventional time-triggering approaches, the employment of a time-varying threshold event-triggered mechanism significantly curtails communication resource wastage without compromising the system's performance. Furthermore, a novel adaptive control algorithm with predefined timing is introduced. This method guarantees that tracking errors converge to within a small vicinity of the origin within a predefined timeframe, ensuring all signals in the closed-loop system remain bounded. Moreover, by adjusting a controller-related parameter, we can predefine the upper bound of the convergence time. Finally, the efficacy of the control scheme is corroborated by simulation results obtained from a nonlinear manipulator system.

Event-Triggered Finite-Time Formation Control of Underactuated Multiple ASVs with Prescribed Performance and Collision Avoidance.

In this paper, an event-triggered finite-time controller is proposed for solving the formation control problems of underactuated multiple autonomous surface vessels (ASVs), including asymmetric mass matrix, collision avoidance, maintaining communication distances and prescribed performance. First, to not only avoid collisions between the follower and leader but also maintain an effective communication distance, a desired tracking distance is designed to be maintained. Second, an improved barrier Lyapunov function (BLF) is proposed to implement the tracking error constraint. In addition, the relative threshold event-triggering strategy effectively solves the communication pressure problem and greatly saves communication resources. Finally, based on coordinate transformation, line of sight (LOS) and dynamic surface control (DSC), a comprehensive finite-time formation control method is proposed to avoid collisions and maintain communication distance. All the signals of the proposed control system can be stabilized in finite time (PFS). The numerical simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed control system.

Event-Triggered Dynamic Coverage Control for Multiple Stratospheric Airships.

This article first investigates the dynamic coverage control problem for the multiple stratospheric airships (MSAs) system considering its practical application scenarios. A dynamic coverage control framework is put forward, in which the MSA system can be guided and controlled to fully cover the observation target region. Once a specific target is detected, the coverage target can be switched. First, the location information of the monitored target is predicted by an autoregressive model against processing delay. Second, the coverage control scheme consists of two layers: a novel potential field-based virtual control law to generate the desired velocity and angular velocity and an adaptive tracking controller to track them. In the virtual control law, a dynamic artificial potential field is introduced to adapt to the dynamic scenarios. In the tracking controller, which is combined with the adaptive control technique and the saturation compensator theory, the external disturbances and input saturation are addressed. Third, the event-triggered mechanism is designed to reduce the control frequency to prolong the actuator life. The simulation results are given to substantiate the capability of the proposed dynamic coverage control framework.

Event-Triggered Tracking Control for Adaptive Anti-Disturbance Problem in Systems with Multiple Constraints and Unknown Disturbances.

Aimed at the objective of anti-disturbance and reducing data transmission, this article discusses a novel dynamic neural network (DNN) modeling-based anti-disturbance control for a system under the framework of an event trigger. In order to describe dynamical characteristics of irregular disturbances, exogenous DNN disturbance models with different excitation functions are firstly introduced. A novel disturbance observer-based adaptive regulation (DOBAR) method is then proposed, which can capture the dynamics of unknown disturbance. By integrating the augmented triggering condition and the convex optimization method, an effective anti-disturbance controller is then found to guarantee the system stability and the convergence of the output. Meanwhile, both the augmented state and the system output are constrained within given regions. Moreover, the Zeno phenomenon existing in event-triggered mechanisms is also successfully avoided. Simulation results for the A4D aircraft models are shown to verify the availability of the algorithm.

Assessment of event-triggered policies of nonpharmaceutical interventions based on epidemiological indicators.

Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPI) such as banning public events or instituting lockdowns have been widely applied around the world to control the current COVID-19 pandemic. Typically, this type of intervention is imposed when an epidemiological indicator in a given population exceeds a certain threshold. Then, the nonpharmaceutical intervention is lifted when the levels of the indicator used have decreased sufficiently. What is the best indicator to use? In this paper, we propose a mathematical framework to try to answer this question. More specifically, the proposed framework permits to assess and compare different event-triggered controls based on epidemiological indicators. Our methodology consists of considering some outcomes that are consequences of the nonpharmaceutical interventions that a decision maker aims to make as low as possible. The peak demand for intensive care units (ICU) and the total number of days in lockdown are examples of such outcomes. If an epidemiological indicator is used to trigger the interventions, there is naturally a trade-off between the outcomes that can be seen as a curve parameterized by the trigger threshold to be used. The computation of these curves for a group of indicators then allows the selection of the best indicator the curve of which dominates the curves of the other indicators. This methodology is illustrated with indicators in the context of COVID-19 using deterministic compartmental models in discrete-time, although the framework can be adapted for a larger class of models.

Observer-Based Event-Triggered Predictive Control for Networked Control Systems under DoS Attacks.

This paper studies the problem of DoS attack defense based on static observer-based event-triggered predictive control in networked control systems (NCSs). First, under the conditions of limited network bandwidth resources and the incomplete observability of the state of the system, we introduce the event-triggered function to provide a discrete event-triggered transmission scheme for the observer. Then, we analyze denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that occur on the network transmission channel. Using the above-mentioned event-triggered scheme, a novel class of predictive control algorithms is designed on the control node to proactively save network bandwidth and compensate for DoS attacks, which ensures the stability of NCSs. Meanwhile, a closed-loop system with an observer-based event-triggered predictive control scheme for analysis is created. Through linear matrix inequality (LMI) and the Lyapunov function method, the design of the controller, observer and event-triggered matrices is established, and the stability of the scheme is analyzed. The results show that the proposed solution can effectively compensate DoS attacks and save network bandwidth resources by combining event-triggered mechanisms. Finally, a smart grid simulation example is employed to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the scheme's defense against DoS attacks.

Event-Triggered Adaptive Fault Tolerant Control for a Class of Uncertain Nonlinear Systems.

This paper considers an adaptive fault-tolerant control problem for a class of uncertain strict feedback nonlinear systems, in which the actuator has an unknown drift fault and the loss of effectiveness fault. Based on the event-triggered theory, the adaptive backstepping technique, and Lyapunov theory, a novel fault-tolerant control strategy is presented. It is shown that an appropriate comprise between the control performance and the sensor data real-time transmission consumption is made, and the fault-tolerant tracking control problem of the strict feedback nonlinear system with uncertain and unknown control direction is solved. The adaptive backstepping method is introduced to compensate the actuator faults. Moreover, a new adjustable event-triggered rule is designed to determine the sampling state instants. The overall control strategy guarantees that the output signal tracks the reference signal, and all the signals of the closed-loop systems are convergent. Finally, the fan speed control system is constructed to demonstrate the validity of the proposed strategy and the application of the general systems.

Leader-Following Consensus and Formation Control of VTOL-UAVs with Event-Triggered Communications †.

This article presents the design and implementation of an event-triggered control approach, applied to the leader-following consensus and formation of a group of autonomous micro-aircraft with capabilities of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL-UAVs). The control strategy is based on an inner-outer loop control approach. The inner control law stabilizes the attitude and position of one agent, whereas the outer control follows a virtual leader to achieve position consensus cooperatively through an event-triggered policy. The communication topology uses undirected and connected graphs. With such an event-triggered control, the closed-loop trajectories converge to a compact sphere, centered in the origin of the error space. Furthermore, the minimal inter-sampling time is proven to be below bounded avoiding the Zeno behavior. The formation problem addresses the group of agents to fly in a given shape configuration. The simulation and experimental results highlight the performance of the proposed control strategy.

Design of Event-Triggered Fault-Tolerant Control for Stochastic Systems with Time-Delays.

This paper proposes two novel, event-triggered fault-tolerant control strategies for a class of stochastic systems with state delays. The plant is disturbed by a Gaussian process, actuator faults, and unknown disturbances. First, a special case about fault signals that are coupled to the unknown disturbances is discussed, and then a fault-tolerant strategy is designed based on an event condition on system states. Subsequently, a send-on-delta transmission framework is established to deal with the problem of fault-tolerant control strategy against fault signals separated from the external disturbances. Two criteria are provided to design feedback controllers in order to guarantee that the systems are exponentially mean-square stable, and the corresponding H∞-norm disturbance attenuation levels are achieved. Two theorems were obtained by synthesizing the feedback control gains and the desired event conditions in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Finally, two numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results.

On Event-Triggered Adaptive Architectures for Decentralized and Distributed Control of Large-Scale Modular Systems.

The last decade has witnessed an increased interest in physical systems controlled over wireless networks (networked control systems). These systems allow the computation of control signals via processors that are not attached to the physical systems, and the feedback loops are closed over wireless networks. The contribution of this paper is to design and analyze event-triggered decentralized and distributed adaptive control architectures for uncertain networked large-scale modular systems; that is, systems consist of physically-interconnected modules controlled over wireless networks. Specifically, the proposed adaptive architectures guarantee overall system stability while reducing wireless network utilization and achieving a given system performance in the presence of system uncertainties that can result from modeling and degraded modes of operation of the modules and their interconnections between each other. In addition to the theoretical findings including rigorous system stability and the boundedness analysis of the closed-loop dynamical system, as well as the characterization of the effect of user-defined event-triggering thresholds and the design parameters of the proposed adaptive architectures on the overall system performance, an illustrative numerical example is further provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed decentralized and distributed control approaches.

Event-triggered impulsive cluster synchronization of coupled reaction-diffusion neural networks and its application to image encryption.

This paper investigates the cluster synchronization of coupled neural networks with reaction-diffusion terms. With the help of impulsive control strategies, some cluster synchronization criteria are proposed by an appropriate event-triggered mechanism. A numerical example is given to verify the validity of the theoretical results. Additionally, the proposed event-triggered impulsive synchronization is successfully applied to image encryption with encouraging cryptanalysis results demonstrating its strong ability to efficiently encrypt images.

LPVS guidance and adaptive event-triggered control for an underactuated surface vessel with the prevention of obstacle's vicious maneuvering.

This paper investigates the adaptive neural event-triggered control for an underactuated surface vessel (USV), considering constraints of the obstacle's vicious maneuvering and the limited communication channel. In the algorithm, a novel logical phantom virtual ship (LPVS) guidance principle is developed to generate the global path following reference and the obstacle avoidance order in the simulation results, where the corresponding operation comply to the suggestion in international regulations for prevention collision at sea (COLREGs). The improved design of velocity obstacle (VO) method can guarantee its predictive capability to prevent the obstacle's vicious maneuvering. As for the control module, the adaptive event-triggered control algorithm is proposed by employing the robust neural damping technique and the input event-triggered mechanism. And the derived adaptive law can effectively solve perturbations from the gain uncertainty and the external disturbances. Through the theoretical analysis, all signals of the closed-loop control system are with the semi-globally uniform ultimate bounded (SGUUB) stability. The simulation experiments have been presented to verify the obstacle avoidance effectiveness and the burden-some superiority of the algorithm.

Event-triggered predictive control for cooperation-competition multi-agent systems under DoS attacks.

This paper concerns the bipartite consensus problem of multi-agent systems(MASs) with competitive- cooperative network topology under denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Firstly, this work extensively analyzes the competitive phenomena that may exist in the information interchange of agents in contrast to the single cooperative behavior between agents. Based on this, some necessary conditions are provided for the system to attain the bipartite consensus. In addition, the event-triggered mechanism (ETM) effectively lowers unnecessary information sharing between agents and eliminates Zeno behavior. Furthermore, the predictive method provides the system with exceptional resistance against common energy-limited DoS attacks and the ability to compensate for information loss caused by DoS attacks. Finally, a numerical simulation proves that the proposed approach is feasible.

Event-triggered prescribed-time control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems using finite time-varying gain.

This paper addresses the event-triggered prescribed-time control problem for a class of high-order nonlinear systems based on finite time-varying gain. Due to the existence of unknown gain functions and system uncertainties, the resultant control with prescribed-time convergence performance becomes nontrivial. The problem becomes even more complex due to the use of event-based communication instead of continuous communication. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes an event-triggered prescribed-time stabilization approach with the following key steps. Firstly, we establish a new prescribed-time stability lemma to overcome the technical difficulty arising from the prescribed-time controller design, and stability analysis. Secondly, we give the controller design procedure upon using the backstepping technique. Thirdly, we redesign the event-triggering threshold condition based on time-varying functions, which allows the controller terminal jitter to be mitigated and the controller to be implemented straightforwardly in practice. Furthermore, the proposed control scheme avoids Zeno behavior. The numerical simulation confirms the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

Event-triggered finite-time formation tracking of multi-agent systems with mismatched disturbances under switching topologies.

The formation tracking of the leader-follower multi-agent systems (MASs) under switching topologies is investigated. The considered system is exposed to both the mismatched and matched disturbances in the dynamics of the leader and followers, which places higher requirements for the robustness of the control protocol. In the presence of disturbances and leader's unknown control input, an innovative distributed observer embedded with robust terms is designed firstly to estimate leader's states in finite time. Taking account of the switching topologies, a novel analysis scheme that divides the convergence process into two stages is proposed to establish the finite-time (FT) convergence of estimation errors. Then, by virtue of a constructed auxiliary variable, a FT controller with an event-triggered mechanism is put forward, in which multiple robust feedback terms are designed wisely to suppress the mismatched and matched disturbances effectively. As a result, the FT formation tracking can be achieved with saved resources, despite perturbed environments and switching topologies. Simulation examples are presented to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Observer-based event-triggered recursive optimal tracking control for a class of strict-feedback nonlinear systems.

In this paper, an innovative event-triggered optimal tracking control algorithm is proposed for input saturated strict-feedback nonlinear systems with unknown dynamics. In order to reduce the requirement of configuring a complete suit of sensors and enhance the reliability of the controlled system, a neural networks (NNs) based adaptive state observer is developed firstly to reconstruct the system states. Subsequently, based on the state estimation information, a hybrid-triggered feedforward controller is designed to transform the original tracking control problem into an equivalent regulation issue, which is then solved by developing an event-triggered optimal controller. Therefore, the final controller consists of a hybrid-triggered feedforward controller and an event-triggered optimal controller. In order to make the actual input signals of the two controllers be updated simultaneously, a synchronization-oriented triggering rule is established by using multiple triggering errors. By virtue of this unique framework, the proposed control scheme can not only minimize the predefined cost function, but also greatly reduce the data transmission. What is more, the convergence properties of the proposed control strategy are achieved by using Lyapunov theory. It is important to note that unlike the widely adopted observer-controller framework, where the separation principle holds for the design of the state observer, there is a considerable coupling relationship between the error dynamics of the state observer and the event-triggered optimal controller in this paper. The distinguishing feature of the proposed method is its ability to ensure a satisfactory level of precision in both state estimation and tracking control, even in the presence of control saturation issues. At last, the proposed control strategy is applied to the tracking control problem of a high-order robot system and marine surface vehicle to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Periodic event-based sliding mode tracking control of Euler-Lagrange systems with dynamic triggering.

In this article, we propose the design of a robust tracking controller of perturbed Euler-Lagrange systems (ELSs) based on dynamic event-triggered (DET) sliding mode control (SMC) with periodic evaluation of triggering rule. To ensure robustness, we employ the SMC technique and introduce a dynamic periodic event-triggering strategy to reduce communication frequency significantly. This strategy involves the incorporation of an auxiliary dynamic variable to formulate the event-triggering condition, leading to the generation of sparser triggering instants. An upper bound of the sampling period is also obtained in this design to facilitate the periodic assessment of the event-triggered strategy, alleviating the need for continuous verification of the event condition. This technique is more economical with respect to communication resources and practical than its continuous counterpart due to the relaxation of continuous measurements. The stability of the closed loop system is established using Lyapunov analysis within the dynamically triggered event-based SMC framework. The necessary switching gain for maintaining the stable motion of the sliding variable is derived with the help of Lyapunov analysis. The tracking error is shown to be ultimately bounded, and Zeno-behaviour is excluded to ensure finite sampling. A comparative analysis based on simulation results is included to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, especially in reducing the network usage in the transient phase of the response while achieving comparable steady-state behaviour. Ultimately, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by simulating a two-link manipulator and experimentally implementing it with a one-link manipulator.

Bipartite synchronization of multilayer signed networks under aperiodic intermittent-based adaptive dynamic event-triggered control.

This article addresses the exponential bipartite synchronization (EBS) of multilayer signed networks with time-varying coupling (MSNs) under aperiodic intermittent-based adaptive dynamic event-triggered control (AAIDETC). Firstly, to increase the elasticity, a novel AAIDETC strategy is presented, whose superiority is that the control gains and the triggering parameters can vary with the evolution of the considered networks. Meanwhile, concerning the aperiodic intermittent control, a new definition of average control ratio (ACR) is put forward, which is more rigorous compared with the relevant results. Then, by the method of ACR, graph theory and Lyapunov approach, the simpler synchronization criterion is gained, which avoids the topology structure of MSNs. Moreover, the EBS issues of Chua's circuits and neural networks established on MSNs are studied, which are two practical applications of our theoretical results. Finally, corresponding numerical simulations are presented to verify the availability of the obtained results.

Event-triggered hybrid impulsive control for synchronization of fractional-order multilayer signed networks under cyber attacks.

In this paper, we consider the exponential bipartite synchronization (EBS) problem of fractional-order multilayer signed networks with time-varying delays (FO-MSNT) under random cyber attacks. In contrast to the existing literature, the proposed hybrid event-triggered controller combines the advantages of feedback controller and impulsive controller, and the event-triggered condition is constructed by applying the network topology and the Lyapunov function of the subsystem, rather than the state function of the subsystem. Based on the Lyapunov-Razumikhin method and the graph theory, some sufficient conditions for achieving EBS of FO-MSNT under cyber attacks which are related to the topology of networks, the event-triggered parameters, the order of fractional derivative and the signal sent by the enemy are obtained. Furthermore, fractional-order coupled Chua's circuits model and fractional-order power systems built on MSNT are established and the EBS issues under cyber attacks are analyzed. Numerical examples and simulations are provided to show the validity of our theories.