Distributed self-triggered control for multi-agent systems

It is desirable to limit the amount of communication and computation generated by each agent in a large multi-agent system. Event- and self-triggered control strategies have been recently proposed as alternatives to traditional time-triggered periodic sampling for feedback control systems. In this paper we consider self-triggered control applied to a multi-agent system with an agreement objective. Each agent computes its next update time instance at the previous time. This formulation extends considerably our recent work on event-based control, because in the self-triggered setting the agents do not have to keep track of the state error that triggers the actuation between consecutive update instants. Both a centralized and a distributed self-triggered control architecture are presented and shown to achieve the agreement objective. The results are illustrated through simulated examples.