Observer‐based fault tolerant control for a class of nonlinear multi‐agent systems with sensor faults

Abstract This article focuses on the robust fault tolerant control (FTC) problem for a class of Lipschitz nonlinear multi‐agent systems(MASs) subject to sensor faults. Firstly, sensor faults are transformed into actuator faults via introducing a new intermediate auxiliary state variable, and a distributed adaptive fault estimation observer is designed to estimate the state information and the concerned faults by using the relative output estimation error. Then, the sufficient existence conditions for the observer to satisfy the robust performance index are given. Thirdly, based on the results of observer design, a new design method of dynamic output feedback controller is proposed to implement consensus of MASs and ensure the desired disturbance rejection performance. Finally, the simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.