Distributed fault-tolerant asymptotic synchronisation control for a class of interconnected nonlinear systems via dynamic high-gain

This study proposes a distributed fault-tolerant synchronisation strategy for a class of nonlinear systems with unknown interconnections, time-varying actuator faults, uncertainties, and heterogeneous reference trajectories. The tracking and synchronisation objectives are first reformulated as a distributed error optimisation problem. A two-layer control framework is then constructed to achieve the optimised coordination. In the upper layer, an error optimiser with synchronisation constraints is designed to generate an optimal error trajectory for each subsystem, while in the lower layer, an adaptive high-gain tracking control law is developed to handle actuator faults and uncertainties, as well as to mitigate the effects of unknown interconnections. Compared with existing results, the proposed algorithm relaxes the requirement for high-order derivatives of the output trajectories and achieves asymptotic synchronisation. Application results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.