Formation control of multi-agent system under quantised communication using event-triggered sliding mode control

This work addresses the problem of event-triggered time-varying formation control of multi-agent systems under quantised communication. Due to bandwidth limitations of the communication channel and the finite storage capacity of the processor, agents may not be able to continuously access exact state information from their neighbours. Instead, we consider event-based inter-agent communication where the information exchanged is quantised with a uniform quantizer. To ensure robustness against modelling uncertainties, quantisation error and external disturbances, a distributed sliding mode control framework is developed with finite-time convergence guarantees. An event-based sampling strategy is integrated to reduce the frequency of communication and control updates. In addition, each agent employs a time-varying threshold that facilitates infrequent sampling, especially during the transient and thus effectively reduces the number of control updates. The proposed scheme guarantees practical formation tracking while preventing Zeno behaviour. Closed-loop stability and convergence of formation error are rigorously analyzed, and simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.