Distributed Fault-Tolerant Control of Uncertain Multi-Agent Systems with Connectivity Maintenance

In this paper, a distributed cooperative control protocol is presented to deal with actuator failures of multi-agent systems in the presence of connectivity preservation. With the developed strategy, each agent can track the reference trajectory of the leader in the presence of actuator failures, disturbances and uncertainties. The connectivity of the multi-agent system can always be ensured during the control process. To achieve the aforementioned control objectives, a potential function is introduced to the distributed adaptive fault-tolerant control algorithm to preserve the initial connected network among the agents. The uncertainty of the multi-agent system, which is allowed to be described by discontinuous functions, is approximated and compensated using the fuzzy logic system. The asymptotic stability of the closed-loop system is demonstrated through the use of Cellina's approximate selection theorem of nonsmooth analysis. Due to the developed adaptive laws, the upper bound of the disturbance is allowed to be uncertain, which facilitates the implementation of the control scheme. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.