Fault-Tolerant Formation Tracking of Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems with Time-Varying Actuator Faults and Its Application to Task-Space Cooperative Tracking of Manipulators

TL;DR

This paper develops a robust distributed control method for heterogeneous multi-agent systems with time-varying actuator faults, ensuring formation tracking and applying it to cooperative manipulator tracking despite uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed control law using Nussbaum gain for fault tolerance in nonlinear multi-agent systems with partial leader information.

Findings

Guarantees asymptotic convergence of formation tracking

Effective in handling unknown, time-varying actuator faults

Validated through numerical simulations

Abstract

This paper addresses a formation tracking problem for nonlinear multi-agent systems with time-varying actuator faults, in which only a subset of agents has access to the leader's information over the directed leader-follower network with a spanning tree. Both the amplitudes and signs of control coefficients induced by actuator faults are unknown and time-varying. The aforementioned setting improves the practical relevance of the problem to be investigated, and meanwhile, it poses technical challenges to distributed controller design and asymptotic stability analysis. By introducing a distributed estimation and control framework, a novel distributed control law based on a Nussbaum gain technique is developed to achieve robust fault-tolerant formation tracking for heterogeneous nonlinear multi-agent systems with time-varying actuator faults. It can be proved that the asymptotic convergence is guaranteed. In addition, the proposed approach is applied to task-space cooperative tracking of networked manipulators irrespective of the uncertain kinematics, dynamics, and actuator faults. Numerical simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed designs.