Estimator-based event-triggered output synchronization for heterogeneous multi-agent systems under denial-of-service attacks and actuator faults

This paper studies the output synchronization problem with an event-triggered communication scheme for a class of heterogeneous multi-agent systems under denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and actuator faults. DoS attacks may render the followers incapable of acquiring the leader's states and actuator faults may cause the actuators to not perform the control operation well. Comparing with the previous studies adopting the continuous communication mechanism, a novel switching estimator with an event-triggered communication strategy is designed to estimate the leader's states for each follower. By using the Lyapunov stability theory and the average dwell time method, sufficient conditions for the upper bound of the frequency of DoS attacks are derived. The estimation error system is proved to be exponentially stable. Besides, in order to compensate for actuator faults, a distributed adaptive fault-tolerant controller is proposed. The conditions for the stability of the output regulation error when the systems suffer from DoS attacks and actuator faults are given. A simulation example is proposed to prove the effectiveness of the main results.