Distributed adaptive fault-tolerant formation control for heterogeneous multiagent systems under switching directed topologies

This paper studies the cooperative fault-tolerant formation control problem of tracking a dynamic leader for heterogeneous multiagent systems consisting of multipile unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) with actuator faults under switching directed interaction topologies. Based on local neighborhood formation information, the distributed fault-tolerant formation controllers are constructed to ensure that all follower UAVs and UGVs can accomplish the demanding formation configuration in the state space and track the dynamic leader’s trajectory. By incorporating the sliding mode control and adaptive control technique, the actuator faults and unknown parameters of follower agents can be compensated. Through the theoretical analysis, it is proved that the cooperatively semiglobally uniformly ultimately boundedness of the closed-loop system is guaranteed, and the formation tracking errors converge to a small adjustable neighborhood of the origin. A simulation example is introduced to show the validity of the proposed distributed fault-tolerant formation control algorithm.