Fault-tolerant control of nonlinear heterogeneous multi-agent systems

In this paper, time-varying loss of effectiveness and time-varying additive actuator faults in nonlinear heterogeneous multi-agent systems (MAS) are considered and an adaptive fault tolerant-control (FTC) scheme based on the virtual actuator framework is proposed. The proposed FTC scheme does not need any separate fault detection, isolation, and identification module. Furthermore, the design of the proposed FTC is independent of the mission of MAS. It is shown that before and after the occurrence of actuator faults, the difference between states of each agent can be arbitrarily reduced and the ultimate bounds of the state error are also calculated. A network of manipulators is considered as a simulation example to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed FTC methodology.