Distributed Fault-Tolerant Formation Control of Cooperative Mobile Robots

This paper presents the design and implementation of a distributed adaptive fault-tolerant leader-following formation control scheme for a team of uncertain cooperative mobile robots under a bidirectional communication topology with possibly asymmetric weights and subject to actuator and nonlinear process faults. A local fault-tolerant control (FTC) component is designed for each ground robot using local measurements and suitable information exchanged between neighboring agents. Each local FTC component consists of a fault diagnosis module and a reconfigurable controller module comprised of a baseline controller and two adaptive fault-tolerant controllers activated after fault detection and after fault isolation, respectively. The FTC algorithms are implemented and demonstrated using a team of ground mobile robots.