Adaptive fault-tolerant control for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems with multiple unknown time-varying control directions

In this paper, we investigate the consensus tracking control for a class of heterogeneous multi-agent systems with multiple unknown time-varying control directions and unknown direction actuator faults. Different from existing work, the directions of the multiple time-varying control coefficients are subject to fault-induced sign-switching. To address this challenge, a series of high-order Lyapunov functions and differentiable functions are introduced to avoid non-integrable terms. Then, a novel contradiction statement and some Nussbaum functions are used to handle the summation of multiple unknown control coefficients with time-varying amplitudes and directions. Meanwhile, a novel distributed observer with quantized communication is introduced to track a reference trajectory with unknown dynamics. It is shown that all closed-loop signals are globally uniformly bounded and the tracking errors converge to residual sets that can be made arbitrarily small. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. © 2024 Elsevier Ltd