Distributed Event‐Triggered Formation Tracking Control for Nonlinear Multi‐Agent Systems With Switching Topologies

ABSTRACT This article investigates the distributed event‐triggered time‐varying formation tracking (TVFT) control problem of nonlinear multi‐agent systems (MASs) under switching communication topologies. To address incomplete state measurements and limited communication resources, a state observer‐based distributed event‐triggered control (DETC) approach is proposed. A state observer is constructed to estimate agent states, and a DETC protocol with formation compensation is designed. The one‐sided Lipschitz condition and quadratic inner bound condition are utilized to handle system nonlinearity. Based on Lyapunov stability theory, it is proved that the closed‐loop system is uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB), the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood near the origin, and the event‐triggering mechanism excludes Zeno behavior. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.