Resilient Time-Varying Formation-Tracking of Multiagent Systems Against Hybrid Attacks With Applications to Spacecraft Formation

Abstract

This work investigates the time-varying formation-tracking problem of multiagent systems under hybrid attacks, including denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and actuation attacks. State estimators are designed for each node of the swarm leveraging relative information from neighboring estimators to generate the desired positional states for formation tracking. The direct use of corrupted consensus control inputs is avoided, thereby defending against actuation attacks targeted at node input signals. Furthermore, we propose an event-triggered protocol with a sampling mechanism to enhance resilience against DoS attacks on communication with neighboring estimators equipped with a topology recovery policy. This resilient protocol against DoS attacks is fully distributed and does not require prior knowledge of network topology, making it scalable to large networks. Finally, an adaptive attack-resilient control scheme is introduced to counteract potential unbounded actuation attacks via output feedback, enabling each follower to track the positional states provided by the distributed estimators. The tracking error is proven to be uniformly ultimately bounded. The proposed event-triggered hierarchical control scheme is validated through its application to spacecraft formation.