Distributed Security and Safety-Critical Formation Control for Multirobot Systems Subject to Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks

This article addresses the problems of cybersecurity and physical safety in formation control of multirobot systems (MRSs) subject to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. A novel distributed formation control method based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is proposed to enhance the system resilience against DDoS attacks. The proposed approach ensures the achievement of the formation objective, provided that no edge in the communication topology is completely disrupted by the attacks. Furthermore, to guarantee collision avoidance among the robots, the centralized pairwise safety barrier certificates, derived from high-order control barrier functions (HOCBFs), are decomposed into the distributed components for the respective robots. Each robot integrates these distributed safety barrier certificates into a unified safety constraint as the inequality constraint in a quadratic programming (QP) problem, which is solved to derive the safety-critical control input. Finally, the effectiveness and practical applicability of the proposed control method are verified through both numerical simulation and physical experiment.