Fault-Tolerant Consensus of Multiagent Systems With Prescribed Performance

Area of Science:

• Control Engineering
• Robotics
• Distributed Systems

Background:

• Multiagent systems (MASs) face challenges from unknown actuator faults and external disturbances.
• Achieving fault-tolerant consensus with guaranteed transient performance is crucial for reliable MAS operation.
• Existing methods often do not address general time-varying actuator faults comprehensively.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the fault-tolerant consensus problem in MASs under unknown time-varying actuator faults (additive and multiplicative) and disturbances.
• To guarantee transient performance by bounding position errors between neighboring agents.
• To develop adaptive control strategies for fault and disturbance estimation and compensation.

Main Methods:

• Design of adaptive laws for estimating unknown time-varying actuator faults and disturbances.
• Development of fault-tolerant controllers for both single-integrator and double-integrator MAS models.
• Analysis of system stability and performance bounds under fault conditions.

Main Results:

• For additive faults, controllers ensure asymptotic convergence to zero consensus error with guaranteed transient performance.
• For combined multiplicative and additive faults, controllers ensure convergence to a residual set with guaranteed transient performance.
• The proposed adaptive schemes effectively estimate faults and disturbances, enhancing system resilience.

Conclusions:

• The developed adaptive fault-tolerant controllers successfully guarantee transient performance for MASs with complex actuator faults.
• The study provides a novel framework for handling general time-varying actuator faults in MAS consensus.
• Simulation examples validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategies.