Control Reconfiguration for Multiple Autonomous Vehicles Subject to Actuator Faults and Disturbances

In this paper, control reconfiguration problem in a team of multi-agent systems subject to actuator faults and environmental disturbances is studied. The proposed distributed control strategy has the capability of being reconfigured by using local information when a fault is detected and identified. It ensures that in absence of disturbances the faulty agent errors remain bounded while its output behaves exactly the same as that of the healthy system. Moreover, the specified H-infinity performance bound is guaranteed to be minimized in presence of bounded energy disturbances. Towards this end, first by employing a geometric approach a set of control gains are obtained that enforce the output of the faulty agent imitates that of the healthy agent while the consensus achievement objectives are satisfied. Next, the remaining degrees of freedom in the selection of the control law gains are used to minimize the bound on a specified H-infinity performance index. Our proposed distributed and cooperative control recovery approach is applied to a team of autonomous underwater vehicles to demonstrate its effectiveness in accomplishing the overall team requirements.