Secure Formation Tracking Control of Leader-Follower Multiple Quadrotors Under DoS Attacks

Abstract

Focusing on resilience enhancement, this article develops a novel control framework for quadrotor formation under Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, during which each quadrotor cannot accept any data from neighboring quadrotors or virtual leader. First, a fixed-time observer is proposed to estimate the virtual leader’s information under DoS attacks, and the explicit relationship between its convergence time and the attack parameters is established. Second, based on the estimated information, a decentralized position tracking algorithm is designed and the corresponding thrust and attitude extraction methods are developed. Then, an attitude control strategy is devised to effectively avoid the unwinding phenomenon. Through a comprehensive simulation example, the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is finally confirmed. Note to Practitioners—Due to vulnerabilities and security flaws in communication protocols, the communication systems of quadrotors face potential security risks. Therefore, maintaining the formation of quadrotors under cyber attacks is a research-worthy topic. This paper designs a resilient observer at the position loop to estimate the state information of the virtual leader in the presence of data loss caused by denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, thereby achieving the desired formation tracking within a fixed time. Additionally, in the attitude loop, a novel attitude control method based on sliding mode control is proposed to avoid the unwinding phenomenon.