A Decentralized Fault Tolerant Control Strategy for Multi-Robot Systems

The paper presents a fault tolerance control strategy for distributed multi-robot systems. The proposed approach is based on a distributed controller-observer architecture that allows each robot to estimate the global system state using local communication. We derive residual dynamics that allows each robot to detect and isolate faults of other robots, even if they are not directly connected. Then, maximum time values to detect the faults are used to implement a fault tolerant control strategy that, in case of fault of one of the robots, allows to reconfigure the team. Numerical simulation results are provided to validate the approach