Observer-Based Adaptive Event-Triggered Fault-Tolerant Control for Bidirectional Consensus of MASs with Sensor Faults

The adaptive event-triggered fault-tolerant control problem for bidirectional consensus of multi-agent systems (MASs) subject to sensor faults and external disturbances is investigated. A hierarchical algorithm is first introduced to eliminate the dependence on Laplacian matrix information, thereby reducing computational complexity. Subsequently, a disturbance observer (DO) and a compensation signal were constructed to accommodate external disturbances, filtering errors, and approximation errors introduced by the radial basis function neural network (RBFNN). Compared with the absence of a disturbance observer, the tracking performance was improved by 15.2%. In addition, a switching event-triggered mechanism is considered, in which the advantages of fixed-time triggering and relative triggering are integrated to balance communication frequency and tracking performance. Finally, the boundedness of all signals under the proposed fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme is established. It has been clearly demonstrated by the simulation results that the proposed mechanism achieves a 39.8% reduction in triggering frequency relative to the FT scheme, while simultaneously yielding a 5.0% enhancement in tracking performance compared with the RT scheme, thereby highlighting its superior efficiency and effectiveness.