Resilient Output Containment under Undisclosed Leader Dynamics and Actuator Attacks

2026-06-25

AI Summary

This work addresses the problem of output containment control for heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems subject to state- and input-dependent actuator attacks, under the challenging condition that the leader’s dynamics are entirely unknown. A continuous two-layer adaptive control architecture is proposed: the first layer employs a virtual actuator to compensate for the attack-induced local tracking errors, while the second layer generates task commands via a low-dimensional adaptive protocol requiring only neighboring interactions and no global graph information. Under directed communication topologies satisfying the rooted joint spanning tree condition and without prior knowledge of the leader dynamics, the proposed approach achieves asymptotic output containment, guaranteeing that all physical outputs converge into the convex hull spanned by the leader’s outputs. Stability is rigorously established through nonsmooth Lyapunov analysis, and numerical simulations on a quadrotor slung-load system demonstrate effective attack recovery and containment performance.

Abstract

This work studies resilient output containment for heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems with actuator cyber-attacks over directed network topologies. The leaders generate bounded locally absolutely continuous trajectories; however, their dynamics, velocity bounds, and motion envelopes are undisclosed to the followers. The cyber-attack model includes state- and input-correlated, as well as bounded exogenous actuator false-data terms. A continuous two-layer adaptive control architecture is proposed. The first layer is a virtual-actuator reconfiguration layer that uses partial state measurements to compensate for actuator attacks in the local tracking-error dynamics. The second layer is a network interface that generates task-space commands via an adaptive interaction protocol. This protocol uses only neighbor-exchanged network-interface states whose dimensions match those of the plant output, and it does not require global graph knowledge for parameter tuning. For directed graphs, under a leader-rooted united spanning-tree condition, a nonsmooth Lyapunov analysis yields asymptotic containment at the command level. The physical outputs then converge to the leader convex hull up to a residual determined by the command-tracking local controllers. Simulation results using a network of quadrotors with damped suspended loads illustrate the performance of attack recovery and containment tracking.

Problem

• resilient output containment
• undisclosed leader dynamics
• actuator cyber-attacks
• heterogeneous multi-agent systems
• directed network topologies

Innovation

• resilient containment control
• actuator cyber-attacks
• undisclosed leader dynamics
• adaptive two-layer architecture
• directed multi-agent networks