An embedded consensus approach for disturbed multiagent systems with communication link faults and actuator faults
Xuechao Qiu, Xiangyu Wang · International Journal of Systems Science · 2025
This paper investigates an output consensus problem for leader-follower disturbed multiagent systems with communication link faults and actuator faults. Different from the traditional distributed control strategy, an embedded consensus approach is presented with two aspects. The first one is the designing of a distributed reference signal generator. The dynamics of the designed reference signal generator are set up to track the leader's motion under the faulted communication link, which is caused by an uncertain communication channel in digital networks and modelled based on data analysis. The reference signal generator plays the role of ‘virtual followers’ with respect to the leader and ‘achieves’ the coordination task. Meanwhile, the reference signal generator acts as a ‘virtual leader’ for the real followers and is ‘embedded’ into the process of the real followers' controllers design. The second aspect is the designing of trajectory tracking controllers. The trajectory tracking controllers are designed for the disturbed real followers to track the dynamics of distributed reference signal generator under the actuator faults by combining the adaptive control technique. Based on these two aspects of design, output consensus for the leader-follower multiagent systems is achieved. The proposed approach facilitates the handling of communication link faults and actuator faults by separating tasks, so the states affected by faults or disturbances will not be transmitted through the network to affect the whole system. Finally, simulations are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.