Distributed adaptive fault‐tolerant consensus tracking of multi‐agent systems against time‐varying actuator faults

This study considers the distributed fault‐tolerant consensus problem for uncertain multi‐agent systems using adaptive protocol. A more general time‐varying actuator fault model is given, which includes loss of effectiveness, stuck, bias and outage fault. A new distributed adaptive control scheme is developed to compensate the effect of fault, multiple delayed state perturbations, mismatched parameter uncertainties and external disturbances on leader–follower multi‐agent systems. Based on the local state information of neighbouring agents, the adaptive updating protocol gains are adjusted online, which remove the assumption that the upper bounds of unknown uncertainty, delayed state perturbation and external disturbances should be known. Moreover, the consensus errors of leader–follower systems can asymptotically converge to zero. Finally, a simulation example is given to show the effectiveness of the theoretical analysis.