Fixed-Time Distributed Average Tracking for a Class of Nonlinear Multiagent Systems With Unity Relative Degree

Abstract

This article investigates the fixed-time distributed average tracking (DAT) problem for nonlinear multiagent systems with unity relative degree under external disturbances. A distributed control framework is developed to guarantee fixed-time convergence of all agents’ outputs to the target trajectory, which is defined as the average of multiple nonlinear reference signals. The approach consists of three main components. First, a steady-state generator is introduced to reconstruct the desired trajectory. Using this generator, a distributed observer is designed to estimate the target trajectory while ensuring robustness against initialization errors. Subsequently, an observer-based output-feedback controller is developed to guarantee the convergence of each agent’s output to its corresponding reference signal within a fixed time. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, it is proved that the proposed control architecture ensures fixed-time convergence to the target trajectory, effectively solving the fixed-time DAT problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through numerical simulations.