Cooperative fault-tolerant tracking control for multi-agent systems: A multiple description encoding scheme

In this article, the cooperative fault-tolerant tracking control (FTTC) is investigated for discrete time multi-agent systems (MASs) with time-varying delays (TVDs) under multiple description encoding schemes (MDESs). First, a uniform channel model is proposed to describe the employed MDES subject to the effect of packet dropouts by introducing two independent random variables obeying the Bernoulli distribution and three indicator variables. Subsequently, a novel intermediate estimator is designed to estimate both system states and a fictitious intermediate variable (an integration of faults and leader's inputs) based on relatively measured outputs. In terms of the Lyapunov stability theory, some sufficient conditions are acquired to guarantee that the closed-loop system is exponentially ultimately bounded in the mean-square sense. Furthermore, the desired gain matrices are obtained by resorting to both the graph feature and singular value decomposition. Finally, the effectiveness and superiority are tested by two simulation examples for the proposed tracking protocol.