Event‐triggered based bearing‐only formation control for nonlinear multi‐agent with unknown disturbance

This article delves into the bearing‐only formation tracking control problem of nonlinear multi‐agent systems with unknown disturbances and unmodeled dynamics, wherein the distributed control solely utilizes the relative bearing information of its neighbors. Firstly, a disturbance observer combined with a neural network is proposed to eliminate the impact of unknown disturbances and unmodeled dynamics. Additionally, a pioneering event‐triggered based backstepping control approach is put forth for the formation tracking control problem of nonlinear multi‐agent systems, which economizes on communication bandwidth and computing resources by decreasing the update frequency of the controller. Finally, using the Lyapunov method, it is demonstrated that all signals of the control system are bounded, and the convergence errors are confined to a small neighborhood of the origin while excluding the “Zeno behavior” phenomenon through rigorous proof.