Distributed Detection of Adversarial Attacks for Resilient Cooperation of Multi-Robot Systems With Intermittent Communication

• Published in: IEEE transactions on control of network systems pp. 1 - 12
• Main Authors: Bahrami, Rayan, Jafarnejadsani, Hamidreza
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2025
• Subjects: Communication networks; Control systems; Distributed algorithms; intermittent communication; Laplace equations; Mobile agents; Multi-agent systems; Network systems; Network topology; Resilience; resilient coordination; Topology; Vectors
• ISSN: 2325-5870; 2372-2533
• DOI: 10.1109/TCNS.2025.3600875

This paper concerns the consensus and formation of a network of mobile autonomous agents in adversarial settings where a group of malicious (compromised) agents are subject to deception attacks. In addition, the communication network is arbitrarily time-varying and subject to intermittent connections, possibly imposed by denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. We provide explicit bounds for network connectivity in an integral sense, enabling the characterization of the system's resilience to specific classes of adversarial attacks. We also show that under the condition of connectivity in an integral sense uniformly in time, the system is finite-gain <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">\mathcal {L}_{p}</tex-math></inline-formula> stable and uniformly exponentially fast consensus and formation are achievable, provided malicious agents are detected and isolated from the network. We present a distributed and reconfigurable framework with theoretical guarantees for detecting malicious agents, allowing for the resilient cooperation of the remaining cooperative agents. Finally, simulation studies illustrate the theoretical findings.