  This paper investigates the communication strategy for second-order
multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics. To save the scarce resources of
communication channels, a novel event-triggered communication mechanism is
designed without using continuous signals among the followers. To get rid of
the centralized information depending on the spectrum of the Laplacian matrix,
a consensus protocol with updated coupling gains and an event-triggered
strategy of interagent communication with updated thresholds are presented. To
minimize the impacts of noise, only relative positions among agents are
employed in the protocol. With the proposed event-triggered mechanism and the
control protocol, the leader-following consensus of MASs and no Zeno behavior
included are mathematically proven. The results are verified through numerical
examples.
