Distributed event-triggered formation control for multi-agent systems in presence of packet losses

This paper proposes an event-triggered approach for the distributed formation control problem of an Euler–Lagrange multi-agent system with state perturbations, when communications between agents are prone to losses. To evaluate its control input, each agent maintains estimators of its own state and of the states of its neighbors. Each estimator accounts for a different packet-loss hypothesis. Each agent is then able to compute the expected value of the estimation error of its own state as evaluated by its neighbors. A communication triggering condition (CTC) exploiting this expected error is then proposed. An analysis of the behavior of the system with this CTC is performed using stochastic Lyapunov functions. Simulations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.