Fault-tolerant dynamic formation control of the heterogeneous multi-agent system for cooperative wildfire tracking

Abstract

This article addresses the collaborative wildfire tracking problem in air-ground heterogeneous multiple agent systems (HMAS) with faulty actuators during fire tracking missions. A fault-tolerant dynamic formation control technique is proposed to enable HMAS to dynamically track wildfire propagation using the fractional-order nonsingular terminal sliding mode (FO-NFTSM) control approach. Additionally, a higher-order sliding mode observer (HOSMO) is designed to estimate unavailable linear velocities and multi-source disturbances arising from external disturbances, system uncertainties, and actuator faults. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control technique in guiding all agents for accurate wildfire tracking, leading to the convergence of collaborative tracking errors within a finite time. Comparative numerical simulations further validate the efficiency of the proposed approach.

Keywords

• Finite-time control
• uncrewed ground vehicle
• uncrewed aerial vehicle
• fault-tolerant control
• dynamic formation control