Adaptive Fixed‐Time Fault‐Tolerant Bipartite Consensus Control for Nonlinear Multiagent Systems: A Hyperbolic Tangent Function‐Based Decoupling Approach

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the fixed‐time (FXT) fault‐tolerant bipartite consensus control for multiagent systems (MASs) with time‐varying actuator faults and nonzero input leader. Both unknown and time‐varying loss‐of‐effectiveness faults and bias faults (BFs) are considered. Due to the inability to decouple the controller from the time‐varying actuator faults, the existing methods cannot achieve the independent design of controller, and thus are unable to handle such faults. In addition, since the information of leader's nonzero input is unknown to all followers, the approach of directly using its upper bound for compensation is invalid. Above factors pose challenges to the design of control scheme. In order to overcome these challenges, first, a new hyperbolic tangent function‐based decoupling approach is developed to eliminate the coupling between the controller and actuator faults, which achieves the independent design of the control scheme. Second, a novel adaptive fault‐tolerant bipartite consensus control protocol with two odd power exponent terms is proposed to compensate for the adverse effects of actuator faults and leader's nonzero input, which achieves the practical (FXT) bipartite consensus for MASs and eliminates the dependence of settling time (ST) on adaptive parameters and fault bounds. Furthermore, a new compensation mechanism is constructed by utilizing the hyperbolic tangent function again, which mitigates the controller chattering caused by traditional methods when handling the leader's nonzero input. Finally, the simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.