Distributed event‐based flocking control for multi‐agent systems with network connectivity‐preserving mechanism

Abstract In this paper, the flocking control of multi‐agent systems (MASs) with connectivity‐preserving is investigated under dynamic topology scenarios. First of all, to avoid the fragmentation of flocking, a novel network connectivity‐preserving mechanism based on an improved potential function is constructed without requiring the connectivity of the original topology. Meanwhile, the introduction of hysteresis distance effectively avoids frequent switching of network topology. Secondly, the distributed event‐triggered controller is constructed. The scheme consists of two parts, including the communication protocol via a network connectivity‐preserving mechanism and the flocking consensus condition with an exponential‐decay term. It is demonstrated that the velocities of all agents achieve consensus and no collisions occur under the designed control scheme. Meanwhile, the Zeno behavior is excluded. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the control strategy is demonstrated by numerical examples and software experiments.