Practical Prescribed-Time Trajectory Tracking Consensus for Nonlinear Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems via an Event-Triggered Mechanism

This paper investigates the problem of practical prescribed-time trajectory tracking consensus for higher-order heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MASs) with unknown time-varying control gains and non-vanishing uncertainties, while also taking external disturbances into account. A directed graph is employed to characterize the communication topology. By introducing a time-varying scaling function and adopting an adaptive backstepping design, a distributed controller is developed that achieves practical prescribed-time trajectory tracking consensus of heterogeneous MASs, while avoiding unbounded control gains and preserving the continuity of control inputs. Furthermore, to optimize the use of communication resources, an event-triggered mechanism is incorporated to reduce the update frequency of controllers. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.