Secure output containment of heterogeneous multi-agent systems against hybrid attacks

In this paper, the secure containment control issue for heterogeneous multi-agent systems subject to hybrid attacks is studied. In the network channels among agents, adversaries launch replay attacks such that the followers can only retrieve the previous information of their neighbors. To characterize the effects of replay attacks, a distributed auxiliary system with heterogeneous time-varying delay is constructed to estimate the convex hull of the leaders’ state. The control input of each follower may be contaminated by the malicious false data injection (FDI) attacks with unknown bounded time-varying signals, which are intended to compromise the containment performance of the whole system. A local adaptive compensator is designed for each follower to eliminate the adverse effects of the FDI attacks. Based on the distributed auxiliary system and the local adaptive compensator, a secure distributed control protocol is proposed to ensure that the output trajectories of each follower can converge to the dynamic convex hull spanned by the leader outputs. Finally, two illustrative examples are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed secure control scheme. •This paper introduces a secure control protocol to dispose a more complicated attack situation.•The original Laplacian matrix is divided into several sub-Laplacian matrices associated with the heterogeneous time-varying delays.•The designed adaptive compensator can fully eliminate the adverse effects of the FDI attacks without using any information of the FDI attacks.