Abstract: | This paper investigates the consensus problem for high‐order multiagent systems with unknown control directions and directed communication constraints. To handle the problem of unknown control directions, a logic switching rule is established in the framework of fixed‐time stability. Then, the consensus is achieved in two steps. A group of distributed fixed‐time observers is designed to estimate the reference signals first. Based on these estimates and the designed logic switching rule, a novel control protocol is proposed for each follower system. Different from the existing results, the consensus is achieved with a fixed‐time convergence rate, and the unknown control directions are allowed to be nonidentical for each agent. Finally, simulation results are given to exhibit the validity of the proposed method. |