Consensus in first order nonlinear heterogeneous multi-agent systems with event-based sliding mode control

This article is aimed at solving leader-following consensus problem with an event-based sliding mode controller. The proposed control technique is partitioned into two parts - a finite time consensus problem and an event-based control mechanism. Leader-following heterogeneous multi-agents of first order having inherent nonlinear dynamics have been analysed to demonstrate efficacy and robustness of the proposed controller. In the first part, states of the follower agents have been attempted to be kept in consistence with those of the virtual leader using sliding mode control. In the second part, an event-based implementation of the control law has been incorporated to minimise the computational load on, and energy expenditure of the computational device equipped with the agents, while ensuring that the desired closed-loop performance of the system is not compromised. The advantage of using such a scheme, i.e. an event-based sliding mode controller, lies in the robustness capabilities of sliding mode controller and reduced computational expense of event-based mechanism. Numerical simulations and mathematical foundations ascertain the effectuality of the controller proposed herein.