Fully distributed secure consensualization for leaderless nonlinear multiagent systems with communication link attacks

Abstract

The secure consensualization for leaderless nonlinear multiagent systems with communication link attacks is realized in a fully distributed manner in a certain sense that the gain matrix design do not depend on the communication topology.A new virtual reference state estimator is proposed for each agent to estimate the common tracking state, which can adaptively adjust coupling strengths to counteract the influence of communication link attacks. Then, by the Lipschitz condition and the special structure property of the time-varying nonsingular transformation matrix, the influence of the Lipschitz nonlinearity on secure consensus is linearized, and a design approach of the secure consensus control gain is given on the foundation of the linear matrix inequality. Finally, a numerical example is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of theoretical results. K E Y W O R D Scommunication link attacks, fully distributed control, Lipschitz nonlinearity, multiagent system, secure consensus INTRODUCTIONRecently, coordinated control of multiagent systems (MASs) has been attached great importance because of its extensive applications in many fields, including consensus/formation control of multiple robots, 1-4 satellite attitude coordination control, 5 and synchronization of smart power grids 6-8 and wireless sensor networks 9,10 and so forth. Fully distributed consensus control is one of the important topics in the above fields, which needs that all agents reach agreement on some interesting variables by constructing the consensus protocol in a fully distributed manner. Some fully distributed consensus protocols and important conclusions were shown in References 11-15, where the influence of the communication link attack or fault was not considered. With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and information technology, the communication link attack is an important threat for MASs. Attacks on the communication link can block the communication channels among agents, and can cause the data information transmitted in the communication topology to be unavailable or invalid, which may seriously damage the consensus properties of the whole system. This motivates researchers to study secure consensus control (SCC) for MASs with communication link attacks.