Distributed Prescribed-Time Consensus Tracking for Heterogeneous Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems Under Deception Attacks and Actuator Faults

In this article, a novel distributed prescribed-time consensus tracking control strategy is presented for heterogeneous nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) under deception attacks and actuator faults. Since the original states of the studied system are unavailable under deception attacks, we present a new coordinate transformation technique considering the compromised states and the outputs of command filters to design the corresponding controller. Then, to handle the unknown control gains caused by actuator faults, the rational adaptive laws are cleverly designed for the upper bounds involving the unknown control gains. Besides, by introducing a time-varying constraint function in the backstepping design process, a new adaptive prescribed-time controller is constructed in this paper, such that the prescribed-time tracking control problem of the heterogeneous nonlinear MASs is converted into the constraint problem of the tracking errors. Through the Lyapunov stability analysis, the final results prove that the whole signals in the closed-loop MASs remain bounded and the tracking errors can converge to the pre-set region in the predefined time. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the availability of the developed control method. Note to Practitioners —This paper investigates the distributed prescribed-time consensus tracking control problem for heterogeneous nonlinear MASs, whose models can be extended to more complex industrial applications, such as flexible manipulators, series elastic actuators and electric systems. In certain practical scenarios, security and fault problems are inevitable. Hence, it is challenging to design a control strategy that achieves distributed consensus tracking control in an insecure network environment. Furthermore, the proposed approach based on the time-varying constraint function ensures the system stability within the predefined time, which provides a viable strategy for engineering applications.