Cooperative Output Regulation of Heterogeneous Systems With Actuator Faults: A Double-Layer Event-Triggered Approach

Abstract

This work addresses the cooperative output regulation (COR) problem of heterogeneous multiagent systems (MASs) subject to actuator faults. First, a novel double-layer event-triggering mechanism (DLETM) is proposed, with appropriately constructed first-layer and second-layer triggering conditions, and allows communication events only at the second-layer’s triggering instants; it ensures that the communication frequency is reduced compared with the existing single-layer event-triggering mechanism (ETM). Then, a double-layer event-triggered (DLET) observer is designed to estimate the exosystem’s matrix with explicit minimum triggering interval (MTI), and an adaptive DLET observer is further developed to estimate the exosystem’s state, such that strong Zeno-freeness is ensured while global topology information is not required to implement the DLET observer. The introduction of the second-layer ETM brings a challenge for stability analysis and DLETM design. To solve this issue, a novel anti-trigonometric function term is added into Lyapunov function with well-designed internal adaptive variables. Moreover, an adaptive control law is designed to handle actuator faults, which ensures that the regulated output converges to zero, whereas most existing methods only ensure bounded error. Finally, simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.