Sampled-data event-triggered control with application to quadcopter formations.

This paper proposes a novel distributed formation controller for general linear multi-agent systems with application to multiple quadcopters. First, a new locally computable state-estimate-based event-triggering communication condition is proposed for each agent. Then, the formation tracking problem is formulated as a stability analysis, controller gain and event-generator gain design problem of the closed-loop formation error dynamics. Sufficient conditions that guarantee the co-existence of a valid formation controller and an event-triggered communication mechanism are derived using a Lyapunov-based method and linear matrix inequality techniques. In addition, equivalent low (agent-sized) dimensional sufficient conditions are obtained to reduce the computational complexity. For the simulation conditions used in this research, the proposed estimate-based event-triggered communication mechanism generates less data communication instants when compared with traditional state-error-based mechanisms while still achieving similar control performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]