The Distributed Adaptive Bipartite Consensus Tracking Control of Networked Euler–Lagrange Systems with an Application to Quadrotor Drone Groups

Actuator faults and external disturbances, which are inevitable due to material fatigue, operational wear and tear, and unforeseen environmental impacts, cause significant threats to the control reliability and performance of networked systems. Therefore, this paper primarily focuses on the distributed adaptive bipartite consensus tracking control problem of networked Euler–Lagrange systems (ELSs) subject to actuator faults and external disturbances. A robust distributed control scheme is developed by combining the adaptive distributed observer and neural-network-based tracking controller. On the one hand, a new positive definite diagonal matrix associated with an asymmetric Laplacian matrix is constructed in the distributed observer, which can be used to estimate the leader’s information. On the other hand, neural networks are adopted to approximate the lumped uncertainties composed of unknown matrices and external disturbances in the follower model. The adaptive update laws are designed for the unknown parameters in neural networks and the actuator fault factors to ensure the boundedness of estimation errors. Finally, the proposed control scheme’s effectiveness is validated through numerical simulations using two types of typical ELS models: two-link robot manipulators and quadrotor drones. The simulation results demonstrate the robustness and reliability of the proposed control approach in the presence of actuator faults and external disturbances.