Fault-tolerant self-organizing control for command tracking of heterogeneous agents

This paper concerns the self-organizing networked control of heterogeneous agents that have to follow a common command signal and may be faulty. In addition to a basic communication, the agents request further information from other agents to avoid large control errors and to simultaneously reduce the communication effort, only if their local control error exceeds a given bound. The paper concerns possible failures of the transmission unit of the agents. To compensate the missing communication, the faulty agents have to be diagnosed and the communication among the other agents has to be reconfigured. As a consequence, the communication structure of the overall system is adjusted to the currently acting command signal and the present faulty agents. It is proven that after the reconfiguration of the communication structure asymptotic command tracking and a desired maximal control error can be guaranteed for the agents that are not faulty. The approach is demonstrated by its application to a robot formation.