Fractional-order follower observer design for tracking consensus in second-order leader multi-agent systems: Periodic sampled-based event-triggered control

This paper investigates the tracking consensus problem for the second-order leader systems by designing fractional-order observer, where a periodic sampled-based data event-triggered control is employed. In order to track the position information of leader, observers for followers are designed by fractional-order system, where only the relative position information is available. Furthermore, in the process of observers design, a sampled-based event-triggered strategy is proposed so that observers use the event-triggered sampled-data, to reduce the overall load of the network. In our proposed event-triggered strategy, the event detection only works at every sampling time instant which determines whether the sampled-data should be discarded or used. Under this control strategy, the Zeno-behavior is absolutely excluded since the minimum of inter-event times is inherently lower bounded by one sampling period. It is found that the followers can track state of the leader if fractional-order observers are appropriately designed and relevant parameters are properly selected. By using the generalized Nyquist stability criterion, a necessary and sufficient condition for the observer tracking consensus of the second-order leader systems is derived. The results show that the real and imaginary parts of the eigenvalues of the augmented Laplacian matrix, and fractional-order α of observer play a vital role in reaching consensus.