Event-Based Fully Distributed Adaptive Formation Control for Multiagent Systems With Bounded Inputs

This article investigates the formation control problem of leader-follower second-order multiagent systems under directed communication topologies. A fully distributed adaptive fixed-time formation control protocol is developed, incorporating an adaptive mechanism to compensate for unknown external disturbances. To handle input constraints, the hyperbolic tangent function is employed in the design of the command filter, adaptive laws, and control protocol, capitalizing on its inherent boundedness. The proposed strategy integrates two auxiliary adaptive parameters into the control gain design, ensuring that the settling time remains independent of any global information, including the Laplacian eigenvalues, initial states, and the potentially large bounds introduced by the hyperbolic tangent function. Furthermore, a dynamic relative-threshold event-triggered mechanism is embedded into the controller to reduce the control update frequency, while rigorously excluding Zeno behavior. Numerical simulations and experimental tests performed on a multiquadcopter platform confirm the efficacy of the proposed approach.