Consensus of Euler–Lagrange Multiagent Systems with Distributed Event-Triggered Communications

Consensus is a crucial issue for Euler-Lagrange multiagent systems (MASs) and their communication resources are often limited. Thus, this article is focused on the leaderless consensus of Euler-Lagrange MASs with limited communication resources. First, a distributed event-triggered (ET) control protocol is proposed, in which the information in both the agent's internal sensor-controller channels and the external channels among agents update only at discrete triggered instants. Compared with existing control protocols, the ET-based distributed control protocol can considerably reduce the transmission loads for Euler-Lagrange MASs. Second, a new method for exclusion of Zeno behavior is proposed, in which only the local Lipschitz condition of systems parameters is needed, and the differential mean value theorem (DMVT) and the boundedness of a continuous function on a closed interval are mainly used. Compared with existing constraint conditions, the differentiability of the agent's regressor matrix is removed. Then, by the ET-based distributed control protocol, leaderless consensus results are derived for Euler-Lagrange MASs. Finally, based on networked two-linked robot manipulators, simulations are presented to show the validity and less communication utilization of the proposed results.