Event-Trigger-Based Recursive Sliding-Mode Dynamic Surface Containment Control with Nonlinear Gains for Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract This paper is concerned with event-triggered containment control for a class of networked nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) subject to limited communication resources. A distributed containment output feedback control strategy with an event-triggered communication mechanism is proposed for the concerned MAS. Considering only a subset of followers to be informed by the leaders, we design a distributed estimator, based on neighbor’s triggered outputs, for estimation of the desired trajectory in real time. A state observer is designed for reconstruction of the unmeasured states of individual followers. Both a nonlinear gain function and a recursive sliding-mode surface are introduced to overcome drawbacks in dynamic surface control approach. It is formally proved that the proposed control strategy guarantees the containment of all followers by the leaders and the ultimate boundedness of the containment errors around the origin. It is also shown that the proposed event-triggered containment controller exhibits a Zeno-free behavior. Finally, two illustrative examples are presented to verify the effectiveness of the obtained results.