Event-Triggered Source Seeking Control for Nonholonomic Systems

This paper introduces an event-triggered source seeking control (ET-SSC) for autonomous vehicles modeled as the nonholonomic unicycle. The classical source seeking control is enhanced with static-triggering conditions to enable aperiodic and less frequent updates of the system's input signals, offering a resource-aware control design. Our convergence analysis is based on time-scaling combined with Lyapunov and averaging theories for systems with discontinuous right-hand sides. ET-SSC ensures exponentially stable behavior for the resulting average system, leading to practical asymptotic convergence to a small neighborhood of the source point. We guarantee the avoidance of Zeno behavior by establishing a minimum dwell time to prevent infinitely fast switching. The performance optimization is aligned with classical continuous-time source seeking algorithms while balancing system performance with actuation resource consumption. Our ET-SSC algorithm, the first of its kind, allows for arbitrarily large inter-sampling times, overcoming the limitations of classical sampled-data implementations for source seeking control.