774 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 65, NO.
6, JUNE 2018
Distributed Fault-Tolerant Time-Varying Formation
Control for Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems
With Actuator Failures and Directed Topologies
Yongzhao Hua, Xiwang Dong, Qingdong Li, and Zhang Ren
Abstract—This brief investigates the distributed fault-tolerant
time-varying formation control problems for second-order
multi-agent systems with directed interaction topologies in the
presence of both bias and loss of effectiveness actuator failures.
Using the adaptive updating mechanism and the boundary layer
theory, a continuous fault-tolerant formation control protocol
is constructed to compensate for the actuator failures and the
derivative of the time-varying formations. The proposed proto-
col is totally distributed without requiring any global knowledge
about the interaction topologies or the bounds of the actuator
failures. The formation feasible condition is provided, and it is
proved that the formation errors are uniformly bounded and
can converge to an adjustable small neighborhood of zero by the
proposed continuous protocol under the influences of actuator
failures.
Index Terms—Time-varying formation, fault-tolerant control,
adaptive control, multi-agent systems, actuator failures.
I. I NTRODUCTION
ORMATION control of multi-agent systems has attracted
F significant interest from a variety of scientific fields,
including formation control of multiple mobile robotic sys-
tems [1], unmanned aerial vehicles [2] and micro-satellites [3].
If the states of a group of agents (e.g., positions and velocities)
can form and keep a prescribed shape, the desired formation is
said to be achieved by the multi-agent system. For a complex
system composed of a large quantity of autonomous agents,
centralized control approaches are no longer applicable and it
is significant to develop distributed formation control strategies
independent of the global information.
Inspired by the consensus control of multi-agent sys-
tems (e.g., [4]–[10]), the consensus-based formation con-
trol approach has received great attention in formation
control field. Distributed formation control protocols for
multi-agent systems with first-order dynamics were presented
in [11]–[14] based on the consensus strategies. In many
Manuscript received June 13, 2017; revised August 4, 2017; accepted
August 31, 2017. Date of publication September 5, 2017; date of current
version May 28, 2018. This work was supported in part by the National
Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61503009, Grant 61333011,
and Grant 61421063, in part by the Aeronautical Science Foundation of
China under Grant 2016ZA51005, in part by the Special Research Project
of Chinese Civil Aircraft, in part by the Innovation Zone Project under
Grant 17-163-11-ZT-004-017-01, and in part by the Fundamental Research
Funds for the Central Universities under Grant YWF-17-BJ-Y-81. This brief
was recommended by Associate Editor M. Cao. (Corresponding author:
Xiwang Dong.)
The authors are with the School of Automation Science and Electrical
Engineering, Science and Technology on Aircraft Control Laboratory, Beihang
University, Beijing 100191, China (e-mail: xwdong@buaa.edu.cn).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSII.2017.2748967
1549-7747 c 2017 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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practical applications, the control input is force or moment,
then the dynamics of each agent should be described by
second-order differential equations. Ren [15] extended a con-
sensus algorithm to handle formation control problems for
second-order multi-agent systems and pointed out that the
consensus-based approach is more general than many clas-
sical formation strategies, such as behavior, virtual structure
and leader-follower based ones. Distributed time-invariant for-
mation control problems for second-order multi-agent systems
were studied in [16] and [17]. Dong et al. [18], [19] inves-
tigated the consensus-based time-varying formation control
problems for a cluster of second-order agents in the pres-
ence of jointly connected topologies and switching directed
topologies, respectively.
It should be pointed out that the characteristics of actu-
ators were not considered in [11]–[19]. In some practical
circumstances, each agent may suffer from certain actuator
failures, which could make the actual outputs of actuators dif-
fer from the control inputs. In the framework of distributed
cooperative control of multi-agent systems, the actuator fail-
ure in a single agent can spread over neighboring agents
through the interaction topology and affect the performance
of the whole system. Thus, it is necessary to investigate the
fault-tolerant control approaches for multi-agent systems with
actuator failures. Fault-tolerant consensus control protocols for
multi-agent systems with actuator bias faults were presented
in [20]–[22], and loss of effectiveness faults were considered
in [23]–[25]. In [26]–[28], consensus control problems for a
group of second-order agents subject to both bias and loss of
effectiveness faults were studied. To the best of our knowl-
edge, fault-tolerant time-varying formation control problems
for multi-agent systems with directed topologies are still open.
Motivated by the facts stated above, this brief investigates
the fault-tolerant time-varying formation control problems for
second-order multi-agent systems with directed interaction
topologies in the presence of both bias and loss of effec-
tiveness actuator failures. Compared with the relevant results
on formation control, the main contributions of this brief are
threefold. Firstly, the expected time-varying formations can
still be achieved by the multi-agent systems with actuator fail-
ures. In [11]–[19], the characteristics of actuators were not
addressed and the multi-agent systems could not keep the
predefined formations under the influence of actuator failures.
The derivative of the time-varying formation was compen-
sated by the control input directly in [18] and [19], but it
is no longer applicable in this brief since the efficiency fac-
tors of actuators are assumed to be unknown and time-varying.
Secondly, the proposed time-varying formation control proto-
col is totally distributed with no need for any global knowledge
HUA et al.: DISTRIBUTED FAULT-TOLERANT TIME-VARYING FORMATION CONTROL FOR SECOND-ORDER MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS
about the communication topology and the bounds of actua-
tor failures. The formation protocol in [19] needs to know the
minimum nonzero eigenvalue of Laplacian matrix and is not
fully distributed essentially. In [23]–[25] and [27], the bounds
of actuator failures are considered to be known, but it is diffi-
cult to determine the exact values of these bounds in practice.
Thirdly, the interaction topology is directed and the proposed
control protocol is continuous. The topologies in [16]–[18]
and [22]–[26] are limited to be undirected. The sign function
was used to design the consensus control protocol in [27],
which would lead to large chattering in the control input.
Based on the boundary layer theory, the continuous control
protocol in this brief can avoid the large chattering efficiently.
Throughout this brief, 1N is used to denote a column vector
with size N composed of 1. Let · stand for the Euclidean
norm of a vector and diag{·} represent a diagonal matrix. The
sign function is denoted by sgn(·). A vector is said to be
positive if all its elements are greater than zero. For a matrix
Q ∈ Rn×m , σmax (Q) stands for its maximal singular value.
II. P RELIMINARIES AND P ROBLEM D ESCRIPTION
A. Basic Graph Theory
Let G = {V, E, A} denote a directed graph with N
nodes, where V = {v1 , v2 , . . . , vN } denotes the set of nodes,
E ⊆ {eij = (vi , vj ) : vi , vj ∈ V; i = j} is the set of edges, and
A = [aij ] ∈ RN×N represents the adjacency matrix with non-
negative weights aij . The weight aij > 0 if and only if eji ∈ E,
and aij = 0 otherwise. Let Ni = {vj ∈ V : (vj , vi ) ∈ E} rep-
resent the set of neighbors of node vi . The in-degree matrix
of G is denoted  by D = diag{degin (v1 ), . . . , degin (vN )}, where
degin (vi ) = N j=1 aij . The Laplacian matrix L of G is defined
as L = D − A. If there exists a directed path from every node
to every other node, the directed graph G is said to be strongly
connected.
Lemma 1 [7]: If the directed graph G is strongly connected,
then
(i) 0 is a simple eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix L and
all the other N − 1 eigenvalues have positive real parts.
(ii)There exists a positive vector ϕ = [ϕ1 , ϕ2 , . . . , ϕN ]T
with N i=1 ϕi = 1 such that ϕ L = 0.
T
(iii) Let  = diag{ϕ1 , ϕ2 , . . . , ϕN }, then L̂ = L + LT 
is symmetric and can be regarded as the Laplacian matrix
associated with an undirected connected graph. Moreover, let
ς ∈ RN×1 stand for any positive column vector and λ2 (L̂)
represent the minimum nonzero eigenvalue of L̂. For φ(t) ∈
RN×1 , it holds that
  λ (L̂)
min φ T (t)L̂φ(t) >
2
φ T (t)φ(t).
φ T (t)ς =0 N +vi (t) − hvi (t). α̂i (t) is an adaptive parameter updated by
B. Problem Description
Consider a second-order multi-agent system with N agents.
The dynamics of agent i (i = 1, 2, . . . , N) with actuator
failures is described by
  βi (t)ξi (t)
ẋi (t) = vi (t),
(1)
v̇i (t) = ρi (t)ui (t) + bi (t),
where xi (t) ∈ Rn , vi (t) ∈ Rn and ui (t) ∈ Rn repre-
sent the position, velocity and control input vectors, respec-
tively. ρi (t) = diag{ρi1 (t), ρi2 (t), . . . , ρin (t)} and bi (t) =
[bi1 (t), bi2 (t), . . . , bin (t)]T , where 0 < ρij (t) ≤ 1 and bij (t)
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775
TABLE I
D IFFERENT M ODES OF ACTUATOR FAILURES
denote the unknown efficiency factor and the unknown out-
put bias of actuator channel j (j = 1, 2, . . . , n), respectively.
Without loss of generality, let n = 1. All the results can be
extended to the higher dimensional case directly using the
Kronecker product.
The different modes of actuator failures considered in
this brief are shown in Table I. Both ρi (t) and bi (t) (i =
1, 2, . . . , N) are assumed to be unknown and time-varying, and
are required to satisfy the following bounded assumptions.
Assumption 1: The unknown efficiency factor ρi (t) is
bounded, and there exists an unknown positive constant ρ i
such that 0 < ρ i ≤ ρi (t) ≤ 1, i = 1, 2, . . . , N.
Assumption 2: The unknown output bias bi (t) is bounded,
and there exists an unknown positive constant b̄i such that
bi (t) ≤ b̄i , i = 1, 2, . . . , N.
The expected time-varying formation is specified by a
vector h(t) = [hT1 (t), hT2 (t), . . . , hTN (t)]T , where hi (t) =
[hxi (t), hvi (t)]T (i = 1, 2, . . . , N) is piecewise continuously dif-
ferentiable. hxi (t) and hvi (t) denote the position and velocity
components of hi (t), respectively.
Definition 1: For any given bounded initial states and
∀i, j ∈ {1, 2, . . . , N}, if
  
limt→∞ (xi (t) − hxi (t)) − (xj (t) − hxj (t)) = 0,
  (2)
limt→∞ (vi (t) − hvi (t)) − (vj (t) − hvj (t)) = 0,
then multi-agent system (1) is said to accomplish the time-
varying formation specified by h(t).
This brief mainly focuses on how to design a distributed
fault-tolerant control protocol such that an expected time-
varying formation can be achieved by multi-agent system (1)
with actuator faults under directed interaction topologies.
III. FAULT-T OLERANT T IME -VARYING F ORMATION
C ONTROL P ROTOCOL D ESIGN AND A NALYSIS
For agent i (i = 1, 2, . . . , N), consider the following fault-
tolerant time-varying formation control protocol:
ui (t) = −α̂i (t)ξi (t) − f (ξi (t)), (3)
N
where ξi (t) = j=1 aij ((xi (t) − hxi (t)) − (xj (t) − hxj (t)))
α̂˙ i (t) = γi (−ηi α̂i (t) + ξi (t)2 + (1 + ḣvi (t))ξi (t)), (4)
where α̂i (t0 ) ≥ 0, γi is a positive constant, and ηi is a
small positive constant chosen by the designer. The nonlinear
function f (ξi (t)) is defined as
ξi (t) , βi (t)ξi (t) > ki ,
f (ξi (t)) = β 2 (t)ξ (t) (5)
i
ki
i
, βi (t)ξi (t) ≤ ki ,
where βi (t) = α̂i (t)(1 + ḣvi (t)) and ki is a positive constant.
According to the boundary layer theory in [29], the function
f (ξi (t)) is the continuous approximation of the sign function
776 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 65, NO. 6, JUNE 2018

and ki represents the size of the boundary layers. If ki → 0, z̃i (t) and ξi (t) (i = 1, 2, . . . , N), multi-agent system (6) can be
one can obtain that f (ξi (t)) → βi (t) sgn(ξi (t)). rewritten in the following form:
Remark 1: In [18] and [19], there are no actuator fail- ⎧˙  
⎨z̃(t) = IN − 1N ϕ ξ (t) − Lz̃(t),
T
ures and the derivative of the time-varying formations (i.e.,
ḣvi (t)) can be compensated by the control input directly. Due ξ̇ (t) = −Pα̂ξ (t) − Pf (ξ (t)) + b(t) (10)
⎩
to the unknown and time-varying efficiency factors of actu- − ḣv (t) + Lξ (t) − L z̃(t),
2
ators, these control approaches are no longer applicable for
multi-agent systems with actuator failures. In this brief, an where P = diag{ρ1 (t), ρ2 (t), . . . , ρN (t)}, α̂ = diag{α̂1 (t),
adaptive updating term is proposed in (3) to deal with ḣvi (t) α̂2 (t), . . . , α̂N (t)} and f (ξ(t)) = [ f (ξ1 (t)), f (ξ2 (t)), . . . ,
in the presence of loss of effectiveness faults. f (ξN (t))]T . For simplicity, the symbol t of some variables is
Let zi (t) = xi (t) − hxi (t) and ri (t) = vi (t) − hvi (t), i = omitted in the following proof.
1, 2, . . . , N. Multi-agent system (1) can be transformed to The time derivative of V along the trajectory of (10) is
 obtained as
żi (t) = ri (t) + hvi (t) − ḣxi (t),  
(6) V̇ = ξ T Lξ − ξ T L2 z̃ + 2z̃T  − ϕϕ T ξ − z̃T L̂z̃
ṙi (t) = ρi (t)ui (t) + bi (t) − ḣvi (t).
 − ξ T Pα̂ξ − ξ T Pf (ξ ) + ξ T b − ξ T ḣv
Let z̃i (t) = zi (t) − N j=1 ϕj zj (t), where ϕj is defined in N
 
Lemma 1. If limt→∞ z̃i (t) = 0 and limt→∞ ξi (t) = 0 + ρ i α̃i −ηi (α̃i + ᾱ) + ξiT ξi + (1 + ḣvi )ξi  ,
(i = 1, 2, . . . , N), one can obtain that limt→∞ (zi (t) − zj (t)) = i=1
0 and limt→∞ (ri (t) − rj (t)) = 0 (i, j = 1, 2, . . . , N). (11)
Then, it follows from Definition 1 that the expected time-
varying formation is achieved by the multi-agent system (1). where L̂ = L + LT  is defined in Lemma 1.
Therefore, if z̃i (t) and ξi (t) are asymptotic stable, the In light of Assumption 1, one can obtain
time-varying formation problems are solved by the proto- N N
col (3). Let z̃(t) = [z̃T1 (t), z̃T2 (t), . . . , z̃TN (t)]T and ξ(t) = − ξ T Pα̂ξ = − ρi α̂i ξiT ξi ≤ − ρ i α̂i ξiT ξi . (12)
[ξ1T (t), ξ2T (t), . . . , ξNT (t)]T . Hereafter, z̃(t) and ξ(t) are regarded
i=1 i=1
as the time-varying formation errors.
In practical applications, the formation errors can hardly It follows from Assumption 2 that
converge to zero exactly under the influences of actuator fail- N N
ures. If the formation errors are uniformly ultimately bounded ξTb ≤ bi ξi  ≤ b̄i ξi . (13)
with sufficiently small bounds, then multi-agent system (1) is i=1 i=1
said to achieve the time-varying formation with certain small N
error, which is acceptable in most practical circumstances. Note that −ξ T ḣv ≤ i=1 ḣvi ξi  and −α̃i (α̃i + ᾱ) ≤
Theorem 1: Suppose that the directed graph G is strongly − 2 α̃i + 2 ᾱ . Then it holds from (11) that
1 2 1 2
connected and Assumptions 1 and 2 hold. If the desired time-  
varying formation specified by h(t) satisfies the feasibility V̇ ≤ ξ T Lξ − ξ T L2 z̃ + 2z̃T  − ϕϕ T ξ − z̃T L̂z̃
condition hvi (t) − ḣxi (t) = 0, then the time-varying forma- N N N
tion errors z̃(t) and ξ(t) and the adaptive control gains α̂i (t) − ξ Pf (ξ ) −
T
ρ i ᾱξiT ξi + b̄i ξi  + ḣvi ξi 
(i = 1, 2, . . . , N) are uniformly ultimately bounded under the i=1 i=1 i=1
fault-tolerant control protocol (3), and converge exponentially N N
to the bounded set 1
 + ρ i α̃i (1 + ḣvi )ξi  + ρ i ηi (−α̃i2 + ᾱ 2 ).
N 2
1 1 i=1 i=1
D = z̃(t), ξ(t), α̂i (t) : V(t) < ρ i ηi ᾱ 2 + ki , (14)
2δ 2
i=1
(7) Three cases are considered in the following proof.
(i) If α̂i (1 + ḣvi )ξi  > ki , i = 1, 2, . . . , N, then one can
where get from (5) that
1
N
ρ i α̃i2 (t) N
V(t) = z̃T (t)z̃(t) + ξ T (t)ξ (t) + , (8) − ξ T Pf (ξ ) = − ρi α̂i (1 + ḣvi )ξi 
2 2γi
i=1 i=1
 = diag{ϕ1 , ϕ2 , . . . , ϕN } and α̃i (t) = α̂i (t) − ᾱ. The positive N
constant δ satisfies δ < mini=1,...,N {λ2 (L̂)/(2N), γi ηi }, and the ≤− ρ i α̂i (1 + ḣvi )ξi . (15)
positive constant ᾱ is sufficiently large such that i=1

1 δ 4 (L) + 4)
N(σmax b̄i 1 (ii) If α̂i (1 + ḣvi )ξi  ≤ ki , i = 1, 2, . . . , N, then it
ᾱ > max + σmax (L) + , , , follows from (5) that
i=1,...,N ρ 2 λ2 (L̂) ρi ρ
N 2
(9) ρi α̂i2 (1 + ḣvi ) ξi 2
− ξ Pf (ξ ) = −
T
where ρ = min{ρ 1 , ρ 2 , . . . , ρ N }. i=1
ki
Proof: Let b(t) = [bT1 (t), bT2 (t), . . . , bTN (t)]T and ḣv (t) = N 2
ρ i α̂i2 (1 + ḣvi ) ξi 2
[ḣv1 (t), ḣTv2 (t), . . . , ḣTvN (t)]T . Since the time-varying formation
T
≤− . (16)
feasibility condition is satisfied, based on the definitions of ki
i=1

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HUA et al.: DISTRIBUTED FAULT-TOLERANT TIME-VARYING FORMATION CONTROL FOR SECOND-ORDER MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS 777

Furthermore, from (16), one has 4N λ2 (L̂)

2ξ z̃ ≤ ξ 2 + z̃2 . (23)
N λ2 (L̂) 4N
−ξ T Pf (ξ ) + ρ i α̂i (1 + ḣvi )ξi  Then it follows from (20)-(23) that
i=1    4  
N
 2
 δ N σmax (L) + 4
α̂i2 (1 + ḣvi ) ξi 2  ≤ − ρ ᾱ − + σmax (L) + ξ 2
≤ ρi − + α̂i (1 + ḣvi )ξi  2 λ2 (L̂)
ki  
i=1
N λ2 (L̂)
1 − − δ z̃2 . (24)
≤ ρ i ki , (17) 2N
4
i=1
Substituting (24) into (19) yields
  
2
where the Young’s inequality in the following form: − ac +a ≤  4
δ N σmax (L) + 4
4 c with a ≥ 0 and c > 0 has been used.
1
V̇ ≤ −δV − ρ ᾱ − + σmax (L) + ξ 2
(iii) In the case where some agents satisfy (i) but oth- 2 λ2 (L̂)
ers correspond to (ii), without loss of generality, assume   N
that α̂i (1 + ḣvi )ξi  ≤ ki (i = 1, 2, . . . , s) and λ2 (L̂)
− − δ z̃2 − (ρ i ᾱ − b̄i )ξi 
α̂i (1 + ḣvi )ξi  > ki (i = s + 1, s + 2, . . . , N), where s 2N
i=1
is a positive integer and 1 ≤ s ≤ N − 1. Similarly, based on
N N
the results in the two cases, it holds that 1 δ
− (ρ i ᾱ − 1)ḣvi ξi  − ρ i ηi − α̃ 2
N
1
s 2 γi i
− ξ T Pf (ξ ) + ρ i α̂i (1 + ḣvi )ξi  ≤ ρ i ki . (18) i=1 i=1
4 N
i=1 i=1 1 1
+ ρ i ηi ᾱ 2 + ki . (25)
Therefore, according to the above three cases (15), (17) 2 2
i=1
and (18), it follows from (8) and (14) that
δ Let the positive constant δ be sufficiently small such that
V̇ ≤ −δV + ξ T IN + L ξ − ξ T L2 z̃ + 2z̃T ( − ϕϕ T )ξ δ < mini=1,...,N {λ2 (L̂)/(2N), γi ηi } and design ᾱ large enough
2 to satisfy (9). Then it follows from (25) that
N
N
+ z̃T (δ − L̂)z̃ − ρ ᾱξ T ξ − (ρ i ᾱ − b̄i )ξi  1 1
i=1
V̇ ≤ −δV + ρ i ηi ᾱ 2 + ki . (26)
2 2
N N i=1
1 δ
− (ρ i ᾱ − 1)ḣvi ξi  − ρ i ηi − α̃ 2 Using the Comparison lemma in [30], one can obtain
2 γi i  
i=1 i=1 N
1 1
ρ i ηi ᾱ + ki e−δt
N
1 1 V(t) ≤ V(0) − 2
+ ρ i ηi ᾱ 2 + ki , (19) 2δ 2
2 2 i=1
i=1
N
where δ is a positive constant. Let 1 1
+ ρ i ηi ᾱ 2 + ki . (27)
δ 2δ 2
i=1
 = ξ T ( IN + L)ξ − ξ T L2 z̃ + 2z̃T ( − ϕϕ T )ξ
2 It follows from (27) that V(t) converges exponentially to the
+ z̃T (δ − L̂)z̃ − ρ ᾱξ T ξ. bounded set defined in (7) with a convergence rate faster than
Note that e−δt , where the positive constant δ gives a lower bound of
the convergence rate of V(t). Therefore, the time-varying for-
ξ T Lξ ≤ σmax (L)ξ 2 , −ξ T L2 z̃ ≤ σmax
2
(L)ξ z̃, mation errors z̃(t) and ξ(t) and the adaptive control gains
2z̃ ( − ϕϕ )ξ ≤ 2σmax ( − ϕϕ )ξ z̃ ≤ 2ξ z̃,
T T T α̂i (t) (i = 1, 2, . . . , N) are uniformly ultimately bounded. This
completes the proof of Theorem 1.
δz̃T z̃ ≤ δ maxi=1,...,N {ϕi }z̃2 ≤ δz̃2 . Remark 2: Due to the influences of actuator failures,
Then one has the formation errors are proved to be uniformly ultimately
δ bounded in Theorem 1. From (7) and (9), one sees that the
≤ + σmax (L) − ρ ᾱ ξ 2 + (σmax
2
(L) + 2)ξ z̃ bounded set D in (7) depends on the interaction topology
2 of the multi-agent system, the bounds of actuator failures,
+ δz̃2 − z̃T L̂z̃. (20) and the design parameters ki and ηi (i = 1, 2, . . . , N). In
view of the actual performance limitations of actuators, one
Due to the fact that z̃T ϕ = 0 and ϕ > 0, one can obtain from
can design ki and ηi relatively small to make the forma-
Lemma 1 that
tion errors converge to a small neighborhood of zero, which
λ2 (L̂) can meet the requirements of the most practical applications.
z̃2 .
− z̃T L̂z̃ ≤ − (21)
N The nonlinear function f (ξi (t)) is a continuous approxima-
Using the Young’s inequality, one gets tion of the discontinuous function βi (t) sgn(ξi (t)) using the
boundary layer theory. Although the formation errors can
4 (L)
Nσmax λ2 (L̂)
σmax
2
(L)ξ z̃ ≤ ξ 2 + z̃2 , (22) converge to zero using the sign function, it will lead to
λ2 (L̂) 4N large chattering in the control input, which is not allowed in

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778 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 65, NO. 6, JUNE 2018
practical situations. The continuous control protocol (3) can
avoid the large chattering efficiently.
Remark 3: Inspired by the so-called σ -modification tech-
nique in [31], the robust adaptive updating law (4) is proposed
in this brief, and it can be verified that the adaptive gain
α̂i (t) updated by (4) satisfies α̂i (t) ≥ 0 for all t ≥ t0 in
the case where the initial value α̂i (t0 ) is nonnegative. Using
the adaptive updating gains, the proposed protocol (3) can be
determined in a totally distributed form with no need for any
global knowledge about the communication topology or the
bounds of actuator failures. In [19], the minimum nonzero
eigenvalue of L is used to design the formation control pro-
tocol, which means that the approach in [19] is not fully
distributed essentially. In [23]–[25] and [27], the fault-tolerant
consensus control protocols all need the bounds of actuator
failures, but it is difficult to determine the exact values of these
bounds in practice. Moreover, Theorem 1 can be used to solve
the fault-tolerant formation control problems with directed
topologies, while the topologies in [16]–[18] and [22]–[26]
are limited to be undirected.
IV. C ONCLUSION
Fault-tolerant time-varying formation control problems for
second-order multi-agent systems with actuator failures and
directed interaction topologies were investigated. Both bias
and loss of effectiveness faults were considered, and the
bounds of the faults can be unknown. With the adaptive updat-
ing mechanism, a fully distributed fault-tolerant formation
control protocol was presented to compensate for the actuator
failures and the derivative of the time-varying formations. An
interesting topic for future work is to deal with the case where
only the relative position and velocity information is available.
Another future research direction is to consider the case where
the directed topology contains a spanning tree.
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