Cooperative fault‐tolerant control for heterogeneous nonlinear multiagent systems via distributed output regulation

This article studies the cooperative fault-tolerant control (FTC) problem of leader-follower multiagent systems with process faults and heterogeneous Lipschitz nonlinearity via output regulation theory. The control objective is to convert the FTC problem into a cooperative output regulation problem such that all followers can track the leader regardless of process faults. Under directed communication topology, distributed observers are first designed to estimate the states and faults of all followers. Specially, the leader in this article is described by a more general nonlinear dynamics. Since only parts of followers can directly obtain the information of nonlinear leader, an adaptive distributed observer is introduced to estimate the state of the leader as feedforward information. By utilizing these estimations, a new distributed FTC protocol is constructed based upon the solutions of nonlinear regulator equation and algebraic Riccati equation. Finally, a numerical example is presented to demonstrate the obtained theoretic results.