Fault‐tolerant formation control of multi‐agent systems with multiple leaders based on intermediate variable estimator

Abstract This article investigates the distributed fault‐tolerant formation control problem of a multi‐leader system with process faults and system uncertainties. This study guarantees all the followers to achieve a specified time‐varying formation and track the combination of multiple leaders. By treating faults as a special type of states, an enhanced system is constructed. Furthermore, an intermediate variable observer is designed, but the observer matching condition is not necessary. The observer is used to estimate faults and system uncertainties, for reconstructing the formation controller. The observer gains are determined by solving linear matrix inequalities. Subsequently, controller gains are designed based on Lyapunov theorem and adaptive techniques. Finally, the proposed method is verified through a simulation example.