Prescribed‐time event‐triggered formation control of heterogeneous multi‐agent system under actuator faults and external disturbances

Abstract In this article, the problem of the prescribed‐time formation control for the heterogeneous multi‐agent systems (MASs) under actuator faults and external disturbances with sampling‐data settings is discussed. A sufficient condition for the MASs to globally converge to a bounded neighborhood within a prescribed time is given, which can ensure the formation control performance of the MASs with actuator faults. Further, an event‐triggered communication mechanism based on the sampled data is designed to reduce the communication burden. Such a triggering mechanism allows for adjusting the triggering interval to a certain extent while ensuring that the Zeno phenomenon is excluded for each agent. To mitigate the impact of the actuator faults and external disturbances on the system formation control, an actuator fault estimator is designed along with a prescribed‐time state observer to estimate the state of each agent. Then an adaptive control strategy is developed so that the MASs can achieve the desired formation within a prescribed time under the actuator faults and external disturbances. Simulation results are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.