Predefined-Time Distributed Fault-Tolerant Control for Nonlinear Multiagent Systems Suffering From Nonaffine Faults

This article investigates the distributed predefined-time (PT) fault-tolerant control for nonlinear multiagent systems (NNMSs) with nonaffine faults. A novel distributed PT control scheme is proposed based on a new PT theorem. The switching functions are introduced into distributed control signals to avoid the singularity problem. The second-order filter technology is designed to solve “explosion of complexity” issues. The newly designed PT compensation signals are utilized to eliminate filter errors. The proposed distributed PT controller based on local information can guarantee that all signals of the closed-loop system are PT bounded, and consensus errors of NNMSs can be enforced to a small region around the origin within a predefined time. Compared with the finite/fixed time, the predefined time is an exact value given in advance, which remains constant regardless of initial states and control parameters. Finally, two comparative simulations are provided to demonstrate the presented strategy.