Event-Triggered Adaptive Bipartite Secure Consensus Asymptotic Tracking Control for Nonlinear MASs Subject to DoS Attacks

This paper proposes an adaptive bipartite secure consensus asymptotic tracking control scheme based on event-triggered strategy for the nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) under denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. First, by incorporating the concept of shortest path into the hierarchical algorithm, the bipartite consensus control problem in the presence of unbalanced communication topology is successfully addressed. Further, an anti-attack bipartite control strategy by designing the improved forms of the tracking errors and virtual controllers is proposed under DoS attacks. Then, a modified event-triggered mechanism based on the relative threshold strategy is proposed, which can ensure that the bipartite consensus tracking errors converge to zero asymptotically by utilizing the Barbalat’s Lemma. Under the Lyapunov stability theory, it is guaranteed that the outputs of all agents can reach agreement with an identical magnitude but opposite signs and all the signals of the closed-loop MASs are bounded. Finally, the simulation results on the model of damping pendulums are given to verify the efficiency of the proposed secure controller. Note to Practitioners—In this paper, the adaptive bipartite secure consensus asymptotic tracking control problem is considered for nonlinear MASs subject to DoS attacks, whose models can describe many critical applications, such as bidirectional formation of unmanned vehicles and robots. The research on the secure tracking control problem will be rather complicated yet challenging if the DoS attacks of the communication channels are taken into account in the insecure complex network environment. In addition, the event-triggered mechanism is used to reduce the usage of communication resources, which makes the proposed control scheme more easier to implement and more friendly for control engineers.