Dynamic‐estimator‐based adaptive secure containment control for constrained nonlinear multi‐agent systems under denial‐of‐service attacks

This article concentrates upon the adaptive secure containment control problem for a class of uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems with the output constraint requirements under denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. At first, to overcome the difficulty that the tracking performance of the nonlinear multi-agent systems under the DoS attacks is disturbed seriously, a novel adaptive secure containment control approach is presented by applying a DoS attacks detection mechanism and introducing the barrier Lyapunov functions, which enables the system to achieve the security control objective that the output of each agent eventually converges to the convex hull spanned by the dynamic leaders' outputs, while never violating the output constraints. Then, a state estimator is designed, which reconstructs the immeasurable states of the multi-agent systems and approximates the completely unknown nonlinearities arising from the agents. In addition, the dynamic surface control technique is used to solve the "explosion of complexity" problem. It is demonstrated that the proposed anti-attack controller ensures that all the signals of the closed-loop system are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded. Finally, a simulation example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.