Fixed-time observer based adaptive neural network time-varying formation tracking control for multi-agent systems via minimal learning parameter approach

This study proposes a novel control scheme to investigate the time-varying formation tracking control problem for multi-agent systems with model uncertainties and the absence of leader's velocity measurements. For each agent, a novel fixed-time cascaded leader state observer (CLSO) without velocity measurements is first designed to reconstruct the states of the leader. Radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs) are adopted to deal with the model uncertainties online. Taking the square of the norm of the NN weight vector as a newly developed adaptive parameter, a novel RBFNN-based adaptive control scheme with minimal learning-parameter approach and fixed-time CLSO is then constructed to tackle the time-varying formation tracking problem. The uniform ultimate boundedness property of the formation tracking error is guaranteed through Lyapunov stability analysis. Finally, two simulation scenario results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed formation tracking control scheme.