Event‐triggered leader‐following consensus for a class of nonlinear multiagent systems with time‐varying delay

This article studies the consensus problem for discrete‐time nonlinear multiagent systems with time delay. Based on an asynchronous event‐triggered mechanism where local information of a communication graph is involved, a distributed consensus protocol is proposed to reduce the network communication congestion for achieving state consensus for multiagent systems with nonlinear perturbations. To avoid complications involving data fusion, this distributed consensus protocol allows every agent to broadcast its state at its own triggering condition instead of using continuous updates and without continuous monitoring of the triggering condition. To save the energy consumption involved in a consensus protocol, the proposed event‐triggering guaranteed cost is investigated in this article for multiagent systems. We select an agent as a leader that is constrained by its neighbors and controlled by the proposed protocol as other agents. It has been theoretically demonstrated that the consensus problem of multiagent systems with nonlinear perturbation and time delays can be achieved if the control gains and the triggering parameters are appropriately selected. Sufficient conditions are given to guarantee that the agents achieve consensus. Moreover, the gain matrix and triggering parameters of the proposed protocol are cast into matrix inequalities conditions. A simulation example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.