Fixed-Time Antidisturbance Consensus Tracking for Nonlinear Multiagent Systems with Matching and Mismatching Disturbances

In this paper, fixed-time consensus tracking for multiagent systems (MASs) with dynamics in the form of strict feedback affine nonlinearity is addressed. A fixed-time antidisturbance consensus tracking protocol is proposed, which consists of a distributed fixed-time observer, a fixed-time disturbance observer, a nonsmooth antidisturbance backstepping controller, and the fixed-time stability analysis is conducted by using the Lyapunov theory correspondingly. This paper includes three main improvements. First, a distributed fixed-time observer is developed for each follower to obtain an estimate of the leader's output by utilizing the topology of the communication network. Second, a fixed-time disturbance observer is given to estimate the lumped disturbances for feedforward compensation. Finally, a nonsmooth antidisturbance backstepping tracking controller with feedforward compensation for lumped disturbances is designed. In order to mitigate the “explosion of complexity” in the traditional backstepping approach, we have implemented a modified nonsmooth command filter to enhance the performance of the closed-loop system. The simulation results show that the proposed method is effective.