Prescribed-Time, Event-Triggered, Adaptive, Fault-Tolerant Formation Control of Heterogeneous Air–Ground Multi-Agent Systems Under Deception Attacks and Actuator Faults

This paper investigates a distributed robust tracking control method with prescribed convergence time for heterogeneous air–ground multi-agent systems under the combined effects of deception attacks and actuator faults. Considering the corruption of state information caused by attacks, a time-varying constraint function is first designed, and a command filtering mechanism is introduced. Through coordinate transformation, the disturbed state is indirectly estimated and safely fed back. To cope with actuator malfunctions leading to uncertain control effectiveness, a rationally designed adaptive law is developed for real-time identification and compensation of such uncertainties. Furthermore, within the backstepping control framework, the concept of time-varying constraints is integrated to propose an adaptive prescribed-time controller, transforming the tracking control problem into an error constraint form, thereby ensuring the system error converges within a specified range within a given time. To reduce communication load, the controller is implemented with an event-triggered mechanism, where control signals are updated only at trigger times, effectively avoiding Zeno behavior. Finally, the boundedness and stability of the closed-loop system are proven using Lyapunov methods. Simulation results demonstrate that this control strategy maintains stable and rapid heterogeneous formation tracking performance even in the presence of deception attacks and actuator faults.