Adaptive fixed-time containment control of MIMO nonlinear multiagent systems via dynamic event-triggered communication

We address the adaptive fixed-time containment (FxTC) control problem of a class of uncertain multi-input multi-output nonlinear multiagent systems using event-triggered inter-agent communication under a directed network. Our primary contribution is to develop multi-leader estimation and dynamic event-triggering strategies to ensure practical fixed-time convergence in a distributed containment control framework. First, an event-triggered mechanism that uses distributed containment errors in the dynamic threshold is introduced to reduce needless data transmissions among agents according to decreasing errors. Subsequently, a multi-leader-estimation-based command-filtered backstepping strategy is established to design a distributed adaptive FxTC controller using only neighbors’ output information. Using the fixed-time stability theory, we show that all closed-loop signals are bounded and all followers can be steered to the convex hull spanned by the leaders within a fixed time, regardless of the initial state conditions. Finally, two simulation examples containing robotic manipulators demonstrate the merits of the suggested control strategy.