Event-Triggered Adaptive Formation Keeping and Interception Scheme for Autonomous Surface Vehicles Under Malicious Attacks

In leader-following formation, the leader plays a central role and is more vulnerable to malicious attacks. To effectively protect the leader, this article investigates an event-based formation control problem of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) with multiple attackers and actuator failure. A novel adaptive formation keeping and interception scheme is developed for ASVs. In this scheme, a formation keeping controller and an interception controller are designed under a unified framework by sharing same event-triggered mechanism and fault-tolerant structure. To bridge these two controllers, a degree and distance driven formation interception ( <tex-math notation="LaTeX">D³</tex-math> FI) strategy is designed by generating defenders. It is shown that with the proposed scheme, all attackers are intercepted without affecting formation keeping of remaining ASVs if the original topology is connected. Advantages of our scheme are: 1) stable controller switching is ensured during the formation cooperation and 2) the fault-tolerance is obtained with lower actuator updating frequencies and least number of adaptive parameters for each ASV.