Sliding mode based prescribed-time consensus tracking control of second-order multi-agent systems

In this work, we investigate the prescribed-time consensus tracking problem for second-order multi-agent systems under directed topology. A new hybrid distributed observer for each follower is developed to estimate the states of the leader in prescribed time. Based on the observer, a novel prescribed-time sliding mode surface that is nonsingular and the corresponding tracking controller are designed such that the full state consensus tracking is achieved within a prescribed time. The salient feature of the proposed control scheme lies in that not only accurate tracking can be achieved within the prescribed time but also the numerical implementation problem arising from the infinite time-varying gain is avoided. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by the numerical simulation.