Robust Adaptive Fault-tolerant Control of Multi-agent Systems with Uncertain Non-identical Dynamics and Undetectable Actuation Failures

Abstract

This paper studies the distributed consensus problem of multiagent systems (MASs) in the presence of nonidentical unknown nonlinear dynamics and undetectable actuation failures. Of particular interest is the development of a robust adaptive fault-tolerant consensus protocol capable of compensating uncertain dynamics/disturbances and time-varying yet unpredictable actuation failures simultaneously. By introducing the virtual parameter estimation error into the artfully chosen Lyapunov function, the consensus problem is solved with a robust adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme based upon local (neighboring) agent state information. It is shown that the proposed method is user friendly in that there is no need for detail dynamic information of the agent or costly detection/diagnosis of the actuation faults in control design and implementation, resulting in a structurally simple and computationally inexpensive solution for the leaderless consensus problem of MAS. Simulation results illustrate and verify the benefits and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.