Fully distributed adaptive practical fixed-time consensus protocols for multi-agent systems

This paper investigates the practical fixed-time consensus problem for a multi-agent system in networks with an undirected topology. Both node-based and edge-based fully distributed adaptive protocols are proposed to achieve the practical fixed-time consensus for the single integrator-type multi-agent systems, i.e., fixed-time attractiveness of a residual set as well as asymptotic consensus. Most notably, the settling time estimate can be computed without using any global information, which is distinctive from the existing fixed-time protocols. Furthermore, a scaling technique is applied for the proposed protocol such that the fixed-time attraction region can be contracted by only tuning a scaling parameter and the original settling time estimate remains unchanged. Finally, a numerical simulation example is given to validate the proposed protocols.