Event-triggered formation control of n-link networked stochastic robotic manipulators

This article proposes an event-triggered control framework to satisfy the tracking formation performance for a group of uncertain non-linear n-link robotic manipulators. The robotic manipulators are configured as a multi-agent system and they communicate over a directed graph (digraph). Furthermore, the non-linear robotic manipulator-multi-agent systems are subject to stochastic environmental loads. By introducing extra virtual controllers in the final step of the backstepping design, a total number of n event-triggering mechanisms are introduced independently for each link of all the robotic manipulator agents to update the control inputs in a fully distributed manner. More precisely, the actuator of each link of a particular agent is capable of being updated independent of other link actuator updates. A rigorous proof of the convergence of all the closed-loop signals in probability is then given and the Zeno phenomenon is excluded for the control event-triggered architectures. The simulation experiments finally quantify the effectiveness of proposed approach in terms of reducing the number of control updates and handling the stochastic environmental loads.