Output Feedback Consensus Control of Nonlinear Multi-agent System Under Communication Faults and Actuator Faults

This paper addresses the problem of leader-follower consistency control for high-order nonlinear multi-agent systems affected by time-varying bounded communication faults and actuator faults. First, an estimator is designed for each follower to address certain followers’ unawareness of the leader system coefficient matrix. Further, an event-triggered communication mechanism is designed to reduce the communication burden among agents. Then state observers for both the leader and followers are designed. Afterwards, a distributed control strategy is proposed utilizing observation information and backstepping technology to ensure that the system can achieve the leader-follower consistency control under time-varying bounded communication faults and actuator faults. The stability of the leader-follower control system is proved using Lyapunov theory, while the Zeno behavior can be excluded for each agent. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed distributed control strategy is verified by a simulation example.