Practical robust fixed-time containment control for multi-agent systems under actuator faults

This article considers a containment control problem for nonlinear multi-agent systems with nonautonomous leaders under directed topology, where each follower may experience various actuator faults and unknown external disturbances. A practical robust fixed-time fault -tolerant controller is proposed that eliminates the adverse effects of disturbances and actuator faults while achieving the containment control objective within a fixed-time. Independent of initial states, a sufficient condition of practical robust fixed-time stabilization is derived, further relaxing the constraint of robust fixed-time stabilization. The combination of sliding-mode control and event-triggered mechanism in this approach provides better control performance. One advantage of this method is that the sliding-mode band size is no longer dependent on the sampling interval but rather on the triggering function. Another advantage is that the resource costs for handling faults are effectively reduced. Additionally, an adaptive boundary layer technique is designed to avoid chattering phenomenon of the discontinuous controller, which utilizes adaptive parameters to autonomously adjust the width of boundary layer. Zeno behavior analysis and a simulated example are also presented.