Distributed adaptive fixed-time formation control for second-order multi-agent systems with collision avoidance

Over the past decades, the formation control of a group of mobile agents has received extensive attention from industrial and academic communities due to its widespread applications, such as spacecraft clusters [1,2], mobile robot teams [3], coordination control of autonomous underwater vehicles [4], cooperative of unmanned aerial vehicles [5,6], etc. To execute these formation operations, the prime concern is to develop a sequence of distributed formation control strategies for networked multi-agent systems such that the desired geometric formation configuration can be achieved in real time [7,8]. So far, a variety of works have been devoted on the formation control design for MASs [9?12]. Meng et al. [13] investi In this work, the distributed fixed-time formation control problem for a group of second order multi-agent systems is investigated with consideration of collision avoidance, external disturbances, and connected undirected topology. As a stepping stone, a novel distributed fixed-time sliding manifold is proposed to achieve the predefined convergence performance. Furthermore, by combining repulsive potential function with the presented sliding manifold, an adaptive fixed-time formation protocol is developed to guarantee the tracking errors converge to small regions of zero, whilst providing collision avoidance ability for multiple agents. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.