Prescribed‐Time Event‐Triggered Synchronization for High‐Order Nonlinear Multi‐Agent Systems Over Directed Communication Graphs

ABSTRACT This article tackles the prescribed‐time (PT) leaderless synchronization control problem of high‐order nonlinear Multi‐Agent Systems (MASs) sharing information over directed communication graph topologies while ensuring the communication network workload saving. To this aim, a novel PT distributed control, also embedding an event‐triggered mechanism, is proposed. The approach ensures the achievement of the consensus task within a user‐assignable settling time, which is independent of agents initial conditions and/or control gains tuning, while saving the communication resources necessary for the accomplishment of the cooperative task. In doing so, the desired synchronization behavior is performed with a significant communication burden reduction and resource waste avoidance. By exploiting the Lyapunov stability theory, the control gains and the event‐triggered mechanism parameters are properly designed to let the MASs achieve the leaderless synchronization within the prescribed settling time while avoiding the Zeno behavior. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by numerical analysis.