Fully Distributed Prescribed-Time Leader-Following Output Consensus of Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems With Dynamic Event-Triggered Mechanism

The fully distributed prescribed-time leader-following output consensus (FDPT-LFOC) of heterogeneous multi-agent systems (HMASs) with a dynamic event-triggered mechanism (ETM) is investigated in this paper. First, a fully distributed prescribed-time (FDPT) observer is developed for each agent to estimate the leader’s state by incorporating an adaptive gain and a time-varying scaling function. The adaptive gain is used to avoid the utilization of global information (e.g., the Laplace matrix eigenvalues, the number of agents) in the observer design, while the time-varying scaling function plays an important role in the PT accurate estimation for the leader’s state. Then, in order to avoid continuous communication among agents while implementing the FDPT-LFOC, a novel dynamic ETM containing a dynamic threshold and the time-varying scaling function is designed. A novel distributed PT (DPT) controller is developed based on the proposed FDPT observer and dynamic ETM. It is shown that the HMASs with the proposed DPT controllers and dynamic ETMs achieve the LFOC within a PT and maintain its consensus performance afterward, while the Zeno behavior can be excluded. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed controller and dynamic ETM is verified by a simulation example. Note to Practitioners—This paper is motivated by achieving the FDPT-LFOC of HMASs with intermittent communication. Although various finite- and fixed-time consensus controllers have been developed for HMASs, the settling time for the controlled HMASs depends on their initial states and control parameters, which cannot be arbitrarily set according to the task requirements. There, it is difficult to apply these results to many time-critical fields, such as missile guidance, emergency braking, and so on. Moreover, most of the existing PT consensus results are focused on first-order or nonlinear MASs and dependent on continuous communication among neighboring agents, which also restricts their application in practical engineering. Therefore, in this paper, a DPT controller and a dynamic ETM are proposed for HMASs to deal with the above challenges.