Distributed fault-tolerant containment control for heterogeneous piecewise affine multi-agent systems with two-layer structure

This paper presents a novel distributed fault-tolerant containment control protocol with two-layer structure for heterogeneous multi-agent systems in which agents are subjected to unknown actuator failures and external disturbances. Especially, the follower agents in this paper are modeled as piecewise affine systems, which can approximate nonlinear systems with arbitrary accuracy, and thus can be applied to more general cases. From the perspective of functional implementation and avoiding fault propagation, the distributed two-layer containment control framework which composed of virtual layer and actual layer is introduced. In this way, the original problem is converted into the containment control issue of virtual layer and the tracking control issue of actual layer. In addition, in order to guarantee the transient performance of agents under actuator failures, the fault-tolerant tracking controller relying on a time-varying performance function is proposed. Finally, simulation studies clarify and verify the developed approach.