Distributed Fault-Tolerant Containment Control for Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems Under Directed Network Topology via Hierarchical Approach

Abstract

This paper investigates the distributed fault-tolerant containment control (FTCC) problem of nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) under a directed network topology. The proposed control framework which is independent on the global information about the communication topology consists of two layers. Different from most existing distributed fault-tolerant control (FTC) protocols where the fault in one agent may propagate over network, the developed control method can eliminate the phenomenon of fault propagation. Based on the hierarchical control strategy, the FTCC problem with a directed graph can be simplified to the distributed containment control of the upper layer and the fault-tolerant tracking control of the lower layer. Finally, simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control protocol.