Observer-Based Prescribed-Time Leader-Follower Consensus for Nonlinear Multiagent Systems Under Stochastic Switching Topologies

• Published in: Journal of systems science and complexity Vol. 38; no. 4; pp. 1595 - 1613
• Main Authors: Cheng, Long, Chen, Xiangyong, Zhao, Feng, Qiu, Jianlong, Cao, Jinde
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.08.2025; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Complex Systems; Control; Disturbance observers; Fuzzy logic; Fuzzy systems; Mathematics; Mathematics and Statistics; Mathematics of Computing; Multiagent systems; Nonlinear systems; Operations Research/Decision Theory; Random processes; Robot arms; Sliding mode control; Statistics; Systems Theory; Topology; stochastic switching topologies; Disturbance observer; prescribed-time sliding mode control; leader-follower consensus; nonlinear multi-agent systems
• ISSN: 1009-6124; 1559-7067
• DOI: 10.1007/s11424-025-4355-5

This paper investigates the prescribed-time leader-follower consensus problem of second-order multi-agent systems (MASs) with stochastic switching directed topologies. For unknown external disturbances, a prescribed-time disturbance observer is designed to accurately estimate disturbances within a prescribed time, and a fuzzy logic system (FLS) is used to approximate the unknown nonlinear functions, which reduces the conservativeness of the control scheme. The information exchange between agents is modeled using a Bernoulli random process due to various factors influencing the communication layer. Meanwhile, a prescribed-time distributed sliding mode control (SMC) scheme is designed, ensuring that the convergence time of the MASs is independent from the initial values and other parameters of the system. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a real single link robot arm system.