Observer-Based Sampled-Data Adaptive Tracking Control for Heterogeneous Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems Under Denial-of-Service Attacks

This paper tackles the security cooperative tracking control problem for uncertain heterogeneous nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) subject to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Since the communication between agents can only transmit digital signals, a periodic sampling mechanism is used to reduce bandwidth pressure. Based on these digital signals, a novel distributed switching observer is designed to estimate the state of the reference system for each follower in the case of DoS attacks on aperiodic intermittently blocked communication channels. Then, an attack-parameter-dependent Lyapunov functional is established to analyze the exponential convergence of the error signals and a design scheme of observer gains is proposed. Further, with the help of the sampling observer outputs, follower’s states and adaptive signals, a sampled-data neural network controller is designed to guarantee the boundedness of the tracking errors by backstepping method and impulsive system analysis theory. Finally, a simulation example is performed to showcase the effectiveness of the developed strategy. Note to Practitioners—In industrial systems, since it is difficult for a single plant to complete complex control tasks, the cooperative control of MASs has gradually become a hot research issue. For example, in industrial automated production, a single robotic arm cannot achieve mass production of products, while multiple robotic arms can achieve this task and improve production efficiency. In this context, the study on cooperative control of MASs is of great scientific and economic value. The wireless communication network is the medium of information transfer between the agents and the controllers, while giving attacker an opportunity to attack. When network interaction information is affected by attacks, the performance and stability of the system are easily damaged. Moreover, under the condition of ensuring the performance of the system, the number of packet transmission is as small as possible, which will be conducive to the applications with limited bandwidth or congested network. Taking these problems into consideration, this paper studies sampled-data tracking control for uncertain heterogeneous nonlinear MASs under DoS attacks. This result provides a reference for the design of digital security controller, and can also be applied to intelligent engineering systems.