Cooperative control for consensus of multi-agent systems with actuator faults

Consensus tracking problem in multi-agent systems with both outage and partial loss of effectiveness types of actuator faults is investigated in this paper. By adopting the virtual actuator technique based on the obtained fault estimates, the effects of possible actuator faults can be effectively compensated in each individual agent. Based on this, a distributed control strategy is developed by using locally available information. It is shown that the tracking error of each fault-free agent can converge to zero and the tracking errors of the faulty agents can remain bounded if the fault estimates are accurate. Moreover, a sufficient condition for achieving bounded tracking errors for all the followers is derived in terms of the fault estimation error. The sliding mode observer is utilized to estimate the faults. Simulation results are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.