Distributed secure consensus control of nonlinear multi-agent systems under sensor and actuator attacks

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on an output secure consensus control issue for nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) under sensor and actuator attacks. Followers in an MAS are in strict-feedback form with unknown control directions and unknown dead-zone input, where both sensors and nonlinear characteristics of dead-zone in actuators are paralyzed by malicious attacks. To deal with sensor attacks, uncertain dynamics in individual follower are separated by a separation theorem, and estimation parameters are introduced for compensating and mitigating the influence from adversaries. The influence from actuator attacks are treated as a total displacement in a dead-zone nonlinearity, and an upper bound, as well as its estimation, is introduced for this displacement. The dead-zone nonlinearity, sensor attacks and unknown control gains are gathered together regarded as composite unknown control directions, and Nussbaum functions are utilized to address the issue of unknown control directions. A distributed secure consensus control strategy is thus developed recursively for each follower in the framework of surface control method. Theoretically, the stability of the closed-loop MAS is analyzed, and it is proved that the MAS achieves output consensus in spite of nonlinear dynamics and malicious attacks. Finally, theoretical results are verified via a numerical example and a group of electromechanical systems.