Fixed-Time Fault-Tolerant Dynamic Formation Control for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems With Communication Link Faults for Collaborative Wildfire Monitoring

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of heterogeneous multi-agent systems (HMAS), comprising multiple uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs) and multiple uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), collaboratively monitoring the wildfire in the presence of actuator faults and communication link faults during the fire monitoring mission. It presents a fixed-time fault-tolerant dynamic formation control scheme designed for HMAS, with the objective of monitoring either the circular or elliptical propagation of a wildfire. The paper adopts a fixed-time extended state observer (FxESO) to estimate the multi-source disturbances arising from external disturbances and actuator faults, ensuring fixed-time convergence of the estimation errors of the FxESO. By utilizing the Lyapunov candidate theorem, the collaborative tracking errors will converge to zero in fixed time, regardless of the initial position, ensuring that all agents in HMAS monitor the dynamic wildfire perimeter. Comparative simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.