Event-Based Distributed Secure Control of Unmanned Surface Vehicles With DoS Attacks

This study investigates the distributed secure control problem of multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) in the presence of wave-induced disturbances and unified abrupt and incipient rudder angle faults in physical layer, and aperiodic Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks in cyber layer. Multi-USVs with rudder angle fault and DoS attack modeling are first established. Then, the decentralized unknown input observer (UIO)-based fault estimation and distributed secure control approach is developed in a co-designed framework for multi-USVs with cyber–physical threats. Advantages of the proposed secure scheme are: 1) actuator faults, DoS attacks, and event-triggering strategies with varying action instants, durations, and locations are synchronously addressed and 2) the criteria of exponential consensus are derived by virtue of attack frequency and average dwelling time technique without prior knowledge of unknown wave-induced perturbation bounds and elimination of Zeno behavior in an event-based mechanism. Comparative simulations outline the performance and advantage of the proposed distributed secure control algorithm.