  This technical note addresses the distributed fixed-time consensus protocol
design problem for multi-agent systems with general linear dynamics over
directed communication graphs. By using motion planning approaches, a class of
distributed fixed-time consensus algorithms are developed, which rely only on
the sampling information at some sampling instants. For linear multi-agent
systems, the proposed algorithms solve the fixed-time consensus problem for any
directed graph containing a directed spanning tree. In particular, the settling
time can be off-line pre-assigned according to task requirements. Compared with
the existing results for multi-agent systems, to our best knowledge, it is the
first-time to solve fixed-time consensus problems for general linear
multi-agent systems over directed graphs having a directed spanning tree.
Extensions to the fixed-time formation flying are further studied for multiple
satellites described by Hill equations.
