Adaptive Neural Self-Triggered Bipartite Fault-Tolerant Control for Nonlinear MASs With Dead-Zone Constraints

An adaptive neural bipartite tracking control approach is proposed for nonlinear multi-agent systems in this article. In contrast to previous results, it is worth noting that this paper considers a cooperative-competitive relationship in multi-agent systems, which stands for a more common situation. In this paper, a distributed self-triggered communication strategy is designed to improve the transmission efficiency of the whole system. In addition, the designed controller can compensate the actuator failure and dead-zone nonlinearity, and increases the system fault-tolerance. The proposed method ensures the boundedness of all signals of the closed-loop system and the bipartite tracking performance. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by two simulation examples. Note to Practitioners —Since complex modern engineering systems are difficult to be controlled by a single component, the cooperative control mode of multi-agent systems has become the mainstream trend. For multi-agent systems with cooperative-competitive relationships, the unique bipartite consensus will allow each agent to better complete the control objectives according to their respective advantages. In addition, for engineering systems such as automated manufacturing systems and transportation systems, fault problems are becoming more commonplace. These faults may make the system difficult to operate normally, and then affect the project progress. Therefore, how to guarantee the normal work of the control system when subject to faults has become a key topic. On the other hand, the channel bandwidth of the actual communication system is limited, and frequent updating of control signals will produce huge communication pressure in the traditional control scheme. Hence, it is challenging to design a control strategy that can achieve system stability and reduce communication resources simultaneously. This paper discusses the bipartite fault-tolerant control problem for nonlinear multi-agent systems. Meanwhile, a distributed adaptive self-triggered mechanism is designed to save communication resources.