This paper studies event-triggered consensus control for heterogenous nonlinear multi-agent systems. We present a new distributed nonlinear event-triggered control algorithm integrating basic radial basis function neural network with event-based control. We show that it can handle any unknown dynamics linear in the control input, achieving practical consensus without Zeno behaviour. A numerical example is provided to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in terms of learning the unknown nonlinear dynamics.
I. INTRODUCTIONThe consensus problem [1,2], where a group of agents in the same network collectively seek to reach a mutually agreeable state, is not robust to nonlinearity, such as malicious agents or external disturbances [3,4]. To overcome this, Rehan et al.[5] presented a modified consensus control protocol under one-sided Lipchitz nonlinearity. Ma et al.[6] adopted a feedback controller to handle stochastic nonlinear disturbances. These algorithms, however, require at least partial, if not full, information about the nonlinearity, such as Lipchitz constants and boundedness. It could be a strong assumption in physical systems as we often do not have sufficient knowledge or exact model of the dynamics. This motivates the use of learning techniques, specifically neural networks, to compensate the influence of the nonlinearity which has shown promising capabilities of estimating unknown dynamics [7][8][9][10][11]. In particular, Zhang et al. [12] proposed a continuous-time consensus algorithm with radial basis function neural network as an estimator of the unknown dynamics.The learning-based consensus algorithms, similar to classical consensus algorithms [13], require continuous information exchange between the neighbours, which is often impractical in reality. In view of this, self-triggered and event-triggered control were introduced to mitigate such connection in control systems in general [14,15]. Eventtriggered consensus control problems have also been widely investigated [16][17][18][19][20]. Yi et al. [21] proposed a dynamic event-triggering law that drastically reduces communication amongst agents without the need for a heavy computation overhead. Tsang et al. [20] designed a stochastic trigger based on existing deterministic counterparts to achieve even lower communication rate. Exponential convegence to consensus can be achieved and require much less communication than time-triggered approaches.