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Volume 13 Issue 4
Apr.  2026

IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica

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Article Navigation >  IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica  > 2026  >  13(4): 903-912
H. Li, X. Jia, X. Chi, and Y. Guan, “Bounded control gain based prescribed-time consensus of general linear multi-agent systems with controllable agent dynamics,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 903–912, Apr. 2026. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2025.125909
Citation: H. Li, X. Jia, X. Chi, and Y. Guan, “Bounded control gain based prescribed-time consensus of general linear multi-agent systems with controllable agent dynamics,” IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 903–912, Apr. 2026. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2025.125909
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Bounded Control Gain Based Prescribed-Time Consensus of General Linear Multi-Agent Systems With Controllable Agent Dynamics

doi: 10.1109/JAS.2025.125909
Funds:  This work was supported in part by the Key Project of the Regional Innovation and Development Joint Fund of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U24A20261) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62373231)
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    Abstract
  • In this paper, the bounded control gain based prescribed-time (Pre-T) consensus problem for general linear multi-agent systems (MASs) with controllable agent dynamics is addressed. First, an observer with Pre-T performance is designed for each agent to estimate the leader’s state within a prescribed time. Then, based on the estimated states, a Pre-T switching controller integrating a bounded control gain is developed by employing a special coordinate transformation in combination with the backstepping technique, under the assumption that the agents’ system matrix pair is controllable. It is shown that the proposed controller enables general linear MASs to achieve the Pre-T consensus independently of the agents’ initial conditions and control parameters. Notably, the controller eliminates the numerical implementation problem associated with unbounded control gains, without compromising the consensus performance. The proposed approach is further applied to high-order single-input MASs to demonstrate its broader applicability. Finally, a simulation example validates the effectiveness of both the proposed observer and the Pre-T switching controller.

     

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