Fixed‐time adaptive anti‐disturbance and fault‐tolerant control for multi‐agent systems

Abstract This article investigates the fixed‐time adaptive anti‐disturbance and fault‐tolerant control problem for a class of nonlinear multi‐agent systems with non‐affine nonlinear faults. A simplified backstepping approach is presented that only requires designing one Lyapunov function for high‐order multi‐agent systems, which reduces the computational burden. By designing a new compound observer, an anti‐disturbance and fault‐tolerant control strategy is developed to estimate and compensate the compound nonlinear terms composed of external disturbances and nonlinear faults. In addition, an auxiliary control variable is designed to solve the problem of “explosion of complexity” and ensure the system stability in a fixed time. Based on the Lyapunov stability method, it is proved that the nonlinear multi‐agent systems are semi‐global practical fixed‐time stable. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified by some simulation results.