Fault-tolerant coordination control for second-order multi-agent systems with partial actuator effectiveness

This paper investigates the fault tolerant coordination control problem for second-order multi-agent systems where actuator of each agent suffers from partial loss of effectiveness fault. Firstly, an active fault tolerant control strategy, which combines a healthy control protocol and an estimation of fault severity, is developed for consensus problem of the multi-agent systems, where the communication topology is directed with a directed spanning tree. Then, the active fault tolerant control method is promoted to the containment problem, where velocities of the leaders are time-varying and the communication topology is undirected. Theoretical results show that, with the proposed fault-tolerant control method, consensus and containment of the multi-agent systems can be achieved if estimation error of the estimated fault severity is less than a calculated threshold. Finally, simulation examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.