Event-triggered distributed consensus control of heterogeneous multi-agent system under communication and actuator faults

In this paper, a heterogeneous leader-follower multi-agent system is studied under simultaneous time-varying communication faults and actuator faults. First, the state of the leader is modeled as the closed-loop reference model (CRM) where the states of the direct-connected followers are fed to the leader to improve the leader-follower tracking capability. An event-triggered communication mechanism is designed for the agent information sharing among its neighbors so as to reduce the communication burden. The designed event-triggered mechanism, capable of adjusting the triggering interval threshold within a certain range, can be applied in practical multi-robot collaborative control to accommodate the varying requirements for different triggering intervals. Considering the time-varying communication link failures, a new distributed event-triggered observer is designed for each follower to estimate the system states so as to reduce the state error, whereas the adaptive distributed event-triggered estimators are further designed for the non-directly connected followers to estimate the coefficient matrix of the leader system. Then, an estimator is designed for the actuator fault estimation to mitigate their impact on the system consistency. Finally, an adaptive control strategy is proposed to ensure the consistency of the leader-follower system under the time-varying communication link faults and actuator faults. It is also shown that Zeno behavior is excluded for each agent and the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive event-triggered control strategy is verified on a heterogeneous multi-agent system.