Switching-Based Distributed Adaptive Secure Formation Control for Mobile Robots With Denial-of-Service Attacks

In this article, the distributed adaptive secure formation control problem for mobile robots is considered. The communication channels among robots are undirected and suffer from denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Only part of the robots can access the reference trajectories. To mitigate attack effects on the formation performance, a switching strategy for communication channels is designed. Besides, an adaptive secure control scheme is proposed with a distributed adaptive trajectory estimator and an adaptive tracking controller for each robot. In the estimator, damping and normalizing terms are introduced to alleviate attack effects on the system performance. Moreover, these terms can also remove the constraints on the lower bounded dwell time of switching topologies. By applying the backstepping technique, an adaptive tracking control scheme is proposed for robots with uncertainties to track estimator states. According to the proposed secure control scheme, a stability condition is provided, such that the boundedness of formation errors can be guaranteed under DoS attacks and arbitrary switching dwell time. Experimental results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed secure control scheme.