Robust fixed‐time connectivity‐preserving consensus for second‐order multi‐agent systems with external disturbances

Abstract

In this study, the authors address the fixed‐time connectivity‐preserving consensus problem for second‐order multi‐agent systems with external disturbances under state‐dependent communication topology, where each agent has a limited sensing range. A novel global integral sliding‐mode consensus protocol is proposed to achieve fixed‐time consensus for leaderless multi‐agent systems, meanwhile maintaining the connectivity of initial communication topology and suppress external disturbances. By Lyapunov theory and homogeneity theory, it is proved that multi‐agent systems achieve fixed‐time consensus convergence and the sufficient condition of topology connectivity preservation is obtained. In addition, the results are extended to the leader–follower multi‐agent systems. The numerical examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the results.