Fully Distributed Fault-Tolerant Consensus-Tracking Control for Multiple Wheeled Mobile Robots With Event-Triggered...

Area of Science:

• Robotics
• Control Systems Engineering
• Distributed Systems

Background:

• Coordinated control of multi-robot systems is crucial for complex tasks.
• Achieving consensus-tracking in multi-robot systems is challenging due to communication constraints and potential actuator failures.
• Existing methods often require full state information or centralized control, limiting practical applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the fully distributed output feedback consensus-tracking control problem for multiple wheeled mobile robots (multi-WMRs).
• To address the challenge of dual-actuator faults (DAFs) in a directed graph communication topology.
• To develop a fault-tolerant control scheme that ensures asymptotic consensus tracking under event-triggered communication.

Main Methods:

• Design of a fully distributed estimator for asymptotically estimating leader states with nonzero input under event-triggered communication.
• Introduction of novel filters to compensate for unmeasured velocity information in the presence of DAFs.
• Development of output feedback fault-tolerant controllers co-designed in a unified framework for each robot.

Main Results:

• The proposed scheme enables output feedback control under partial loss-of-effectiveness (PLOE) faults in dual actuators.
• Fully distributed consensus tracking is achieved with event-triggered communication, even with actuator faults.
• The existence of a unique solution for the final control laws is rigorously established.

Conclusions:

• The developed approach effectively addresses the consensus-tracking problem for multi-WMRs with DAFs.
• The combination of distributed estimation, filtering, and fault-tolerant control ensures robust system performance.
• Simulation results validate the proposed scheme's effectiveness in achieving reliable coordinated control.