Self-triggered secure bipartite formation for MASs against byzantine attacks: A distributed unknown input observer approach

The present paper studies the self-triggered secure bipartite formation for MASs against Byzantine adversaries, where an asymptotic stabilization control protocol is designed. Compared with the existing work, a more practical situation is considered where the state of each subsystem is unmeasurable and the system output is transmitted to its neighbor agents instead of the state. First of all, a distributed bipartite formation variable (DBFV) is introduced and the bipartite formation control objective turns out to be a convergence problem of the DBFV. Then, the dynamic system of the DBFV is set up where a multiple disturbance (MD) is involved. Next, the algebraic relation between the MD and the DBFV is defined, based on which a distributed unknown input observer (DUIO) is designed such that the asymptotic convergence estimates of the DBFV and the MD are obtained. Further, a DUIO-based controller is established to realize the asymptotic stabilization of the DBFV dynamic system. Finally, a Byzantine detection and defense strategy is designed based on the self-triggered mechanism with discontinuous updates of the communication topology, where nonsmooth dynamics theory is introduced into the stability analysis of the DBFV system. The proposed strategy and controller are validated by a simulation example.