Event-Trigger-Based Finite-Time Privacy-Preserving Formation Control for Multi-UAV System

Abstract

Privacy-preserving has been crucial technique of multi-UAV systems, including cooperative detection, cooperative penetration and strike. Unprocessed interactive information poses a serious privacy threat to UAV swarm collaborative tasks. Considering not only privacy-preserving but also bandwidth constraints and the convergence performance of multi-UAV systems, this paper comprehensively proposes an original event-triggered-based finite-time privacy-preserving formation control scheme to resolve these three factors. Firstly, this paper adopted a local, deterministic, time-varying output mapping function for a privacy mask, which encodes the internal states of the UAV prior to its public transmission, and the initial true value of each UAV’s states is kept indecipherable for honest-but-curious UAVs and other malicious eavesdropping attackers. Then, considering the limited communication bandwidth and channels, we employed a distributed event-triggered strategy and deduced the triggering condition for consensus-based formation control, which effectively reduces the excessive consumption of communication and computational resources in contrast to time-triggered strategy. In terms of the convergence performance of the UAVs, finite-time stability theory was introduced to make the system reach the desired formation in finite time and obtain a settling time related to the initial state. Compared with the existing literature, this paper systematically took into account the above three factors for multi-UAV systems and provides a convergence analysis and a privacy analysis in detail. Finally, the effectiveness of the finite-time privacy-preserving protocol based on an event-triggered strategy was demonstrated by numerical simulation examples and comparative experiments. The proposed method achieves the formation control under privacy-preserving, improves the convergence rate and reduces the frequency of controller updates and information transmission.