Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Output Containment of Heterogeneous Agents with Unknown Leaders

This paper addresses the containment control problem for heterogeneous multi-agent systems featuring unknown leaders and potential actuator failures. The dynamics of the leaders are undisclosed to all followers with only partial information available to some followers regarding the leaders' states or outputs. A model-free adaptive observer is proposed for each follower, which aims to estimate not only the convex hull of the leaders states but also the dynamic information of the unknown leaders. The followers may be influenced by the actuator failures. Based on the adaptive observer and the adaptive solution of the output regulation equation, an adaptive fault-tolerant control project is designed to relieve the impact of actuator failure on containment performance such that the output containment errors are ultimately uniformly bounded, the proposed control method assures that the output trajectories of each follower can converge into the convex hull formed by the leaders in the meaning of ultimately uniformly bounded. A simulation example is presented to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed control scheme.