Fault‐tolerant output synchronisation control of multi‐vehicle systems

This study presents a fault‐tolerant output synchronisation control approach for a class of non‐linear multi‐vehicle systems. Firstly, adaptive fault diagnosis observers are designed for vehicle systems by utilising local measurements. Adaptive thresholds for distributed fault‐detection of each vehicle system are derived. Then an adaptive fault estimation algorithm is proposed. Using the online obtained fault information, an adaptive fault‐tolerant control protocol is designed to ensure the output synchronisation of the networked vehicle systems. It is proved that the proposed active fault‐tolerant control protocol is capable of maintaining the output synchronisation performance of the multi‐vehicle systems, at an acceptable level, in the presence of faults. Finally, simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.