Induced attack on formation control of multiagent systems with prescribed reference trajectories

Abstract The induced attack on the formation control of multiagent systems is investigated from the perspective of the attacker, where a new induced attack strategy is proposed to drive the whole formation of multiagent systems to the prescribed reference trajectory. Compared with denial‐of‐service attacks and deception attacks, a desired formation reference trajectory with the stable formation structure is reached by the induced attack instead of disrupting the whole formation. First, the induced attack signal is produced by designing an attack generation exosystem, whose dynamics can be described by the regulated attack matrix and can be adjusted to generate the prescribed reference trajectory. Then, based on the local state information, the formation vector, and the induced attack signal among partial agents, a new distributed induced attack formation protocol is proposed, which is composed of the nominal formation term and the induced attack term. Meanwhile, the induced attack design criterion is proposed by utilizing a robust scheme, where the robust performance bound can be configured by two performance regulating parameters and can be used to design the appropriate regulated attack matrix. Furthermore, by establishing the projection of the induced attack signal onto the formation agreement subspace, an explicit expression of the prescribed reference trajectory is determined, which depicts the movement trajectory of the entire formation of the multiagent system under the induced attack. Finally, a simulation is provided to vindicate the effectiveness of theoretical results.