On December 25, 2014, invited by the Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, College of Engineering, Professor Wei Ren from Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Riverside gave a seminar entitled “Distributed event-triggered and self-triggered consensus for general linear agents in directed networks” to the College of Engineering at Peking University. Professor Zhongkui Li hosted the event.

In this talk, Professor Ren introduced the event-triggered consensus problem for multi-agent systems with general linear dynamics under a general directed graph. Based on state feedback, Ren’s group proposed a decentralized event-triggered consensus controller (ETCC) for each agent to achieve consensus, without requiring continuous communication among agents either for control inputs or for triggering conditions. Each agent only needs to monitor its own state continuously to determine when to trigger an event and broadcast its state to its out-neighbors. The agent updates its controller when it broadcasts its state to its out-neighbors or receives new information from its in-neighbors.

Nowadays, the ETCC can be implemented in multiple steps. They proved that under the proposed ETCC there is no Zeno behavior exhibited. To relax the requirement of continuous monitoring of each agent’s own state, the team further proposed a self-triggered consensus controller (STCC). For the case with output feedback, they further propose a distributed observer-based event-triggered consensus controller (OBETCC). Simulation results are given to illustrate the theoretical analysis and show the advantages of the proposed event-triggered and self-triggered controllers.

Prof. Wei Ren’s research focuses on distributed control of multi-agent systems and autonomous control of unmanned vehicles. Dr. Ren is an author of two books Distributed Coordination of Multi-agent Networks and Distributed Consensus in Multi-vehicle Cooperative Control. He was a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2008.

The students were very interested in this lecture, and discussed with Ren on many questions. They expressed this lecture would be very helpful for their future study.