A New Fixed-Time Consensus Tracking Approach for Second-Order Multiagent Systems Under Directed Communication Topology

This paper considers fixed-time consensus tracking of second-order multiagent systems (MASs) under directed interaction topology. A novel distributed observer is presented to estimate the leader's states within a fixed time, which overcomes the difficulties caused by the asymmetry of the Laplacian matrix. A sliding surface is designed and a nonsingular terminal sliding mode consensus protocol is developed to achieve fixed-time convergence of the tracking error to the origin. It is shown that each follower can track the leader's trajectory within a fixed time. Particularly, the gain of the presented consensus protocol is directly related to the prescribed time, which makes it convenient to determine and tune the gain according to the requirement of convergence time. Moreover, the presented control protocol reduces the conservativeness of the convergence time estimation for sliding motion. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed consensus scheme.

Automated summary

This paper introduces a novel distributed observer and consensus protocol for fixed-time consensus tracking of multiagent systems. The results demonstrate that each follower can track the leader's trajectory within a fixed time, with the gain directly related to the prescribed time.