Periodic event-triggered communication-based cooperative output regulation for nonlinear MAS with packet dropouts: A...

This paper proposes a novel time-varying gain approach for the cooperative output regulation of nonlinear multi-agent systems. Notably, asynchronous packet dropouts among agents under a periodic event-triggered communication framework are taken into consideration. To address information transmission interruptions caused by packet dropouts, an estimator-compensated distributed observer is developed. This method converts the issue of observer information reception failure induced by packet dropouts into an estimator state update problem, thereby achieving effective reconstruction of the exosystem output. Meanwhile, a periodic event-triggered mechanism embedded with dropout events is designed for each follower, which can adjust the triggering frequency in response to the real-time packet dropout situation, enabling asynchronous intermittent communication among agents and saving communication resources. Furthermore, different from iterative backstepping approaches, a concise quasi-linear controller is constructed via the time-varying gain method, which guarantees tracking error convergence to zero. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control protocol is verified via a single-link manipulator system.