Bipartite Event-Triggered Output Tracking Consensus of Heterogeneous Linear Multi-Agent Systems Under Switching Directed Topologies

This paper investigates the bipartite event-triggered output consensus problem in heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems (MASs) with a leader operating under signed jointly connected digraphs. The research addresses both cooperative and adversarial communication among agents by introducing a novel edge-based bipartite event-triggering mechanism (ETM), as well as a dynamic ETM for communication between the leader and followers. Subsequently, a distributed bipartite compensator utilizing the composite ETMs is proposed to estimate the states of the leader, and serves as a reference for the states of followers. Moreover, a significant feature of the compensator is that it reduces the frequency of communication between the leader and followers. Besides, it is proven that the system with the compensator can exclude Zeno behavior. Furthermore, observers designed to estimate the states of followers, as well as a new distributed control protocol, are proposed to address the output tracking problem of heterogeneous linear MASs. The results demonstrate that, through the proposed protocol, the output tracking error of the closed-loop control system converges to zero exponentially. Finally, the theoretical findings of this study are validated through a numerical example and an application example.