An $H_{\infty}$ Cooperative Fault Recovery Control of Multi-Agent Systems

In this work, an H∞ performance fault recovery control problem for a team of multi-agent systems that is subject to actuator faults is studied. Our main objective is to design a distributed control reconfiguration strategy such that a) in absence of disturbances the state consensus errors either remain bounded or converge to zero asymptotically, b) in presence of actuator fault the output of the faulty system behaves exactly the same as that of the healthy system, and c) the specified H∞ performance bound is guaranteed to be minimized in presence of bounded energy disturbances. The gains of the reconfigured control laws are selected first by employing a geometric approach where a set of controllers guarantees that the output of the faulty agent imitates that of the healthy agent and the consensus achievement objectives are satisfied. Next, the remaining degrees of freedom in the selection of the control law gains are used to minimize the bound on a specified H∞ performance index. The effects of uncertainties and imperfections in the FDI module decision in correctly estimating the fault severity as well as delays in invoking the reconfigured control laws are investigated and a bound on the maximum tolerable estimation uncertainties and time delays are obtained. Our proposed distributed and cooperative control recovery approach is applied to a team of five autonomous underwater vehicles to demonstrate its capabilities and effectiveness in accomplishing the overall team requirements subject to various actuator faults, delays in invoking the recovery control, fault estimation and isolation imperfections and unreliabilities under different control recovery scenarios.