Event-Triggered Time-Varying Group Formation Control for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems Under Jointly Connected Topologies

This paper investigates the problem of time-varying group formation for heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems (MASs) under joint switching topologies. In order to accomplish complicated coordination tasks, the MAS is divided into multiple groups, each consisting of a leader and multiple followers. The leader is responsible for providing trajectory as a reference for movement, while the followers form a certain formation around the leader within their respective groups. To address the situation of incomplete information availability of agents, compensators and observers are designed in this study. On this basis, an event-triggered formation control protocol is proposed for each follower to ensure that the output tracking error converges to zero. Finally, the effectiveness of the theoretical results is verified through a numerical simulation.