Distributed Security and Safety-Critical Formation Control for Multirobot Systems Subject to Distributed...

Area of Science:

• Robotics
• Control Systems
• Cybersecurity

Background:

• Multirobot systems (MRSs) face cybersecurity threats like distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
• Ensuring physical safety and formation control in MRSs under cyberattacks is challenging.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel distributed formation control method for MRSs resilient to DDoS attacks.
• To guarantee collision avoidance and formation objectives despite communication disruptions.

Main Methods:

• A directed acyclic graph (DAG) based distributed formation control approach.
• Decomposition of centralized safety barrier certificates (from high-order control barrier functions - HOCBFs) into distributed components.
• Integration of distributed safety certificates into a unified safety constraint for quadratic programming (QP) based control input generation.

Main Results:

• The proposed method enhances MRS resilience against DDoS attacks.
• Formation objectives are achievable if communication topology edges are not fully disrupted.
• Collision avoidance is guaranteed through distributed safety barrier certificates.

Conclusions:

• The novel distributed control method effectively addresses cybersecurity and physical safety challenges in MRSs.
• The approach is validated through simulations and physical experiments, demonstrating practical applicability.