Event-based distributed adaptive sliding mode consensus tracking control of high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems

In this article, we investigated the adaptive tracking control problem for the n -order nonlinear leader-following multi-agent systems. In order to study how to enable complex multi-agent systems to achieve rapid responses and stably tracking performance, this paper adopts an event-based distributed adaptive sliding mode control method. Compared with the existing consensus results of nonlinear multi-agent systems based on the robust adaptive sliding mode control method, this paper considers the higher-order nonlinear system with unknown control parameters. As a result, the findings are more generalized and the stably tracking performance is achieved. A novel sliding mode reaching law based on hyperbolic tangent function has been designed in this paper to achieve fast response of complex high-order systems. By establishing the distributed adaptive sliding mode controllers, multi-agent systems can effectively enhance the system’s robustness against external disturbances, eliminate steady-state errors in the system, and improve tracking accuracy. Besides, an event-triggered mechanism is devised to reduce the waste of network resources. Using Lyapunov’s stability theory and backstepping method, some sufficient conditions are given to ensure that the adaptive tracking errors of the nonlinear system has ultimately uniform boundedness. Simulation examples are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed event-based distributed adaptive sliding mode controller.