Resilient Containment Control of Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems Against Unbounded Attacks on Sensors and Actuators

Accurate local state measurement is important to ensure the reliable operation of distributed multi-agent systems (MAS). Existing fault-tolerant control strategies generally assume the sensor faults to be bounded and uncorrelated. In this paper, we study the ramifications of allowing the sensor attack injections to be unbounded and correlated. These malicious sensor attacks may bypass the conventional attack-detection methods and compromise the cooperative performance and even stability of the distributed networked MAS. Moreover, the attackers may gain access to the actuation computing channels and manipulate the control input commands. To this end, we consider the resilient containment control problem of general linear heterogeneous MAS in the face of correlated and unbounded sensor attacks, as well as general unbounded actuator attacks. We propose an attack-resilient control framework to guarantee the uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop dynamical systems and preserve the bounded containment performance. Compared with existing literature addressing bounded faults and/or disturbances that are unintentionally caused in the sensor and actuator channels, the proposed control protocols are resilient against unknown and unbounded attack signals simultaneously injected into sensor and actuator channels, and hence are more practical in the real-world security applications. A numerical example illustrates the efficacy of the proposed result, by highlighting the resilience improvement over the conventional cooperative control method.