Fully distributed event-triggered bipartite formation tracking for multi-agent systems with multiple leaders and matched uncertainties

This paper investigates the bipartite time-varying output formation tracking issue for general linear multi-agent systems with multiple leaders and matched uncertainties. The outputs of followers are required to form two antagonistic prescribed time-varying subformations, one of which tracks the convex combination of the outputs of multiple leaders and the other tracks the symmetric convex combination. An independent asynchronous fully distributed event-triggered control protocol is formulated by using relative information between neighboring agents. It is shown that, with the formulated protocol, the bipartite time-varying output formation tracking can be achieved if the feasible formation condition is satisfied. The Zeno behavior is proved to be excluded. Then, we further construct a novel self-triggered control protocol to avoid continuous monitoring of estimate error. Since the protocol incorporates both event-triggered control and adaptive control, it efficiently avoids continuous communication among agents and can be implemented in a fully distributed manner. Moreover, it is noteworthy that in the case where relative information is available while absolute information is not, the protocol is applicable. Finally, the feasibility of the constructed protocols is verified by a numerical example.