Prescribed-Time Consensus Tracking for High-Order MASs With Privacy Protection via Fully Actuated System Approach

This study addresses the adaptive prescribed-time consensus tracking control problem for high-order multi-agent nonlinear systems with an improved privacy protection mechanism. A distinctive feature of the control method lies in the utilization of the fully actuated system approach to study high-order multi-agent systems, enabling system control without the need to simplify the high-order systems into the first-order systems. For agents requiring state information protection, the flexible privacy protection treats the output mask function as the transformation function, thereby protecting the privacy of all signals in the systems and allowing users to define the protection time. In addition, a prescribed-time scale function suitable for high-order systems is proposed by incorporating a constant term to avoid the singularity issue. This prescribed-time tracking control strategy ensures that the synchronization error converges to the prescribed region within the prescribed time, and prescribed time aligns with user-defined time in the privacy protection mechanism. Finally, the superiority of the proposed control method is verified through a numerical simulation comparison with different privacy protection method. Note to Practitioners—This paper aims to develop prescribed-time control algorithm for high-order multi-agent systems with privacy protection via the fully actuated system approach. In the field of automation, the sensitivity of information exchange among agents is extremely high, and any carelessness may lead to the leakage of original data details, posing a serious threat to the overall performance and stability of the system. Therefore, the adoption of advanced privacy protection technologies is particularly crucial, as it not only effectively safeguards personal privacy rights but also maintains the security and stability of the system. The fully actuated system approach enables a more precise characterization of the cooperation relationships and dynamic behavioral characteristics among agents, laying a solid foundation for designing more efficient control strategies. Furthermore, the introduction of prescribed-time control technology allows users to achieve the required control accuracy within a prescribed time, thereby minimizing the unnecessary expenditure of industrial resources and boosting resource efficiency in automation.