Distributed Finite-time Consensus Control for Surface Vehicles with Bounded Input and Fixed-time Observer

This paper investigates the finite-time consensus algorithms for a multi-agent system consisting of multiple surface vehicles through a fixed connected undirected graph. The objective is to design distributed algorithms that use only the local information to drive the surface vehicles to an identical heading angle. By leveraging the homogeneity properties and stability theory, we prove that the proposed distributed algorithms with bounded input make the synchronization error converge to zero in finite time under both the leaderless and leader-follower cases. To relax the assumption that every vehicle requires angular velocity information, a fixed-time observer is developed in the leader-follower case such that the followers can track the leader's heading angle in finite time without measuring the angular velocity. The proposed distributed algorithms are finally validated in simulations using the scale model of a surface vehicle.