Least-Distance Formation Control for a Class of Connected Autonomous Engineering Vehicles under Multilayer Attacks

This paper investigates the security control of leastdistance formation problems for a class of connected autonomous engineering vehicles (CAEVs) under multilayer attacks, where the autonomous engineering vehicle signifies a mobile platform integrated with a manipulator. At first, coordinate transformations and the degrees of freedom (DOF) separation technique are utilized to address coupling control and nonholonomic constraints in CAEVs' motion modeling. Then, two hierarchical algorithms are proposed that enable CAEVs to achieve formation control and position optimization with utilizing agreed distance pairs and least-distance preferences. Particularly, a distributed resilient consensus protocol is implemented in the cyber-layer to counter DoS attacks, as well as several fault-tolerant techniques are complemented in the physical-layer to compensate the actuator attacks' adverse impacts, including effectiveness degradation and unknown control directions. Finally, the convergence results are obtained hierarchically and validated through simulation studies.