Distributed Adaptive Secure Consensus Tracking Control for Asynchronous Switching Nonlinear MASs Under Sensor Attacks and Actuator Faults

A distributed adaptive secure control algorithm is proposed for asynchronous switching nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) in pure-feedback form while considering the sensor attacks and actuator faults, which eliminates the effect of attack signals, actuator faults and uncertainties without knowing the sign of the control gain functions. Since the system states measured by the sensors are corrupted by the malicious attacker, only the post-attack system states can be obtained. Thus, an improved coordinate transformation is constructed by using the post-attack system states and a backstepping method based on the improved coordinate transformation is developed to solve the consensus tracking control problem of the researched systems under sensor attacks. The common Lyapunov function is designed to ensure the stability of all asynchronous switching subsystems of each agent. In the end, a simulation example is presented to illustrate the theoretical results’ validity. Note to Practitioners—This paper deal with the distributed adaptive secure consensus tracking control problem for asynchronous switching nonlinear MASs, whose models can describe many phenomena in nature such as biological processes, robot team formation and sensor networks. It is extremely challenging to achieve the tracking control problem of the researched asynchronous switching nonlinear system in an unsafe network environment, where the unknown sensor attacks signals, actuator faults coefficients, and randomly switched non-affine nonlinearities exist together for the followers. Furthermore, the control design and stability analysis of the researched system is based on the common Lyapunov approach, which makes the developed approach more engineering oriented.