Finite-time cooperative output regulation of heterogeneous nonlinear multi-agent systems under switching DoS attacks

This paper addresses the problem of finite-time cooperative output regulation (COR) for a class of heterogeneous nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) subject to switching denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The communication topology of the MASs under DoS attacks would be time-varying and even completely disconnected during certain time intervals. A novel resilient distributed observer is first designed to obtain the information of the exosystem state, and it is proven that the observer errors converge to zero within a finite time when the bound of the total DoS duration satisfies certain conditions. Then based on this observer and the finite-time command filter back-stepping technique, a new adaptive finite time controller is proposed. A notable feature of our proposed controller is its ability to handle the non-differentiability of the observer state caused by the occurrence of DoS attacks, which is typically problematic in the conventional backstepping design. It is shown that the resulting closed-loop system achieves practical finite-time stability. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme through a numerical simulation study. (c) 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.