A distributed event-triggered data-based control protocol is proposed for a class of unknown nonlinear heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MASs) to address consistent reference signal tracking issue subject to the limited communication bandwidth. First, an event-triggering condition that only relies on local output data of each agent is designed, and the event-triggered communication between different agents depends on this condition. Second, agent models are constructed dynamically using dynamic linearization technology. Third, a novel distributed data-driven control strategy based on event-triggered communication mechanism is designed for heterogeneous agents to realize consistent desired trajectory tracking mission under switching topologies. The proposed control protocol is characterized by the information transmission of each agent in a fully intermittent manner without any global I/O (Input and Output) data. On this basis, convergence performance is analyzed using the principle of compressed mapping. Results showed that the tracking error of all agents is uniformly bounded. Effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through two numerical experiments.

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