Event-Triggered Cooperative Output Regulation for MASs with Prescribed Time Constraints

This paper investigates the prescribed-time cooperative output regulation for nonlinear multi-agent systems via event-triggered control. Unlike traditional static event-triggered mechanisms (ETMs), we introduce dynamic variables into the design of the event-triggered conditions, which relaxes the conservativeness of the triggering criterion, thus improving the system's flexibility and efficiency. The threshold for triggering can be adjusted in a more adaptive manner based on real-time system data, leading to more efficient use of resources. Additionally, by co-designing the controller with the event-triggered conditions, the approach effectively eliminates exclude Zeno behavior and avoid bounded results caused by using the existing quadratic-based ETCs. Furthermore, by proposing an error-tolerant prescribed-time control criterion, it is ensured that the system state can still converge to zero within the prescribed time even in the presence of triggering errors. An enhanced dynamic surface control (DSC) technique is employed to resolve the “explosion of complexity” typically encountered in the backstepping method. To validate the proposed approach, a practical example involving a circuit is presented, highlighting the method's effectiveness.