Distributed robust fault-tolerant consensus control for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems with intermittent communications

Highlights：

• The designed distributed robust fault-tolerant control can be adjusted online by utilizing an adaptive mechanism with time-varying gains. This illustrates that the new distributed robust fault-tolerant control can be a promising scheme to compensate for both actuator faults and intermittent communications automatically.

• A topology-based average dwell time approach is adopted here to deal with the switching jumping issue in the presence of intermittent communications. Besides, the proposed method can handle multiple faults and attenuate the external disturbance for both fixed communication topology and switching communication topology.

摘要

•This paper is the first to consider the H∞ consensus problem for a class of nonlinear MASs with actuator faults in the physical layer and intermittent communications in the cyber layer. To address this difficulty, a distributed robust fault-tolerant control approach by utilizing an adaptive mechanism is revealed.•The designed distributed robust fault-tolerant control can be adjusted online by utilizing an adaptive mechanism with time-varying gains. This illustrates that the new distributed robust fault-tolerant control can be a promising scheme to compensate for both actuator faults and intermittent communications automatically.•A topology-based average dwell time approach is adopted here to deal with the switching jumping issue in the presence of intermittent communications. Besides, the proposed method can handle multiple faults and attenuate the external disturbance for both fixed communication topology and switching communication topology.