Distributed adaptive fault-tolerant containment control for multi-agent systems with nonautonomous leaders: A hierarchical event-triggered scheme

With the booming of multi-agent systems (MASs), it is critical for the MASs to tackle the problems arising from the actuator faults, which could result in the MASs suffering from poor performance or even a severe crash. Thus, this article considers an issue of containment control for non-linear MASs with nonautonomous leaders in the presence of actuator faults. A distributed adaptive fault-tolerant containment control via a hierarchical event-triggered scheme is designed to eliminate the adverse effects caused by the additive and multiplicative actuator faults on the systems. Correspondingly, two kinds of triggering functions for followers and nonautonomous leaders are constructed, respectively. It is worth noting that the related thresholds of triggering functions can be dynamically adjusted due to the adaptive auxiliary parameters, by which fewer triggering instants are needed. By utilizing adaptive strategies, the self-regulation of fault-tolerant containment control via a hierarchical event-triggered scheme is improved. After that, a sufficient condition is derived from making the MASs stabilizable. In addition, the proof of eliminating Zeno behavior is given. The experimental results demonstrate the validity of these theoretical findings exhaustively.