Active Disturbance Rejection Event‐Triggered Formation Tracking Control for Multiagent Systems With Switching Topology

Abstract

This paper addresses the time‐varying formation tracking (TVFT) problem of multiagent systems with followers subjected to nonlinear external disturbances. A new distributed event‐triggered TVFT control strategy with an active disturbance rejection scheme is proposed using only neighboring interaction. Firstly, a prescribed‐time extended state observer is established for each follower to estimate the disturbance in a prescribed time, which provides the controller with real‐time disturbance compensation. Then, to save limited resources, a novel two‐stage event‐triggered mechanism (ETM) is introduced. A dynamic ETM is applied during the transient response stage and is switched to a static ETM with larger fixed trigger thresholds once the system reaches the steady‐state stage, overcoming the problem of excessively small thresholds caused by the dynamic ETM. It is proven that the proposed method guarantees practical fixed‐time stability under switching directed topology and excludes the Zeno phenomenon. Finally, simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented TVFT control solution.