Resilient Output Formation Containment of Heterogeneous Multigroup Systems Against Unbounded Attacks

This article studies the attack-resilient output formation containment of general high-order heterogeneous multigroup systems under unknown unbounded attacks. The multigroup systems consist of cooperative heterogeneous leaders and followers, as well as adversarial attackers. Potential attacks on the multigroup systems consist of unknown unbounded signals generated from the attackers and injected distributedly into the actuator, the local state feedback, and communication channels of each agent to destabilize the synchronization dynamics. In contrast to the existing literature dealing with bounded disturbances, noises, and faults, which are caused unintentionally, this article studies the unknown unbounded attacks that are intentionally designed to jeopardize the system. The control objective is to make each follower’s output trajectory reach the uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) convergence to the time-varying formation reference, that is, the centroid of the multiple leaders’ output trajectories while keeping a predefined time-varying offset with respect to it. Fully distributed attack-resilient control protocols are proposed, without requiring any global information. Lyapunov techniques are used to analyze the stability and UUB synchronization result of the overall closed-loop system. Comparative simulation examples are given to validate the proposed results.