Hierarchical Distributed Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Control of Nonlinear Fractional-Order Multiagent Systems With Faults and Periodic Disturbances Using Event-Triggered Communication

This article presents a distributed fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme for nonlinear fractional-order (FO) multiagent systems (MASs) with the order lying in (0, 1, such that the proposed control architecture can be directly applied to both FO and integer-order (IO) systems without any modifications. To handle the unexpected actuator faults encountered by the FO MASs, a hierarchical FTC mechanism is developed for each system by constructing an event-triggered distributed FO estimator at the upper layer to estimate the leader system's output via conditionally triggered neighboring information, and an FTC unit at the lower layer to counteract the loss-of-effectiveness faults via Nussbaum function with FO criteria. To further address the unknown nonlinear functions involving bias faults and periodic disturbances, the Fourier series expansion technique is used to construct the input variables of fuzzy neural networks (FNNs), such that the FNNs with dynamically adjusted weight matrices, centers, and widths can be developed for each FO system to act as the learning module. It is shown by FO Lyapunov stability analysis that all follower systems can track the leader system against faults and periodic disturbances. Simulation results on FO systems and hardware-in-the-loop experiment results on IO fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles show the extensive feasibility of the developed scheme.