Weight-Based Distributed Formation Control for Networked Marine Surface Vehicles With Hybrid Communication Channel Deception Attacks

The control interaction in networked marine surface vehicles (NMSVs) mainly involves three communication channels, i.e., vehicle-to-vehicle, sensor-to-controller, and controller-to-actuator channels. Existing works have given defense solutions to attacks on a single communication channel while ignoring attacks on hybrid communication channels. Motivated by this observation, this article studies the defense strategy of hybrid communication channel deception attacks (HCCDAs) in distributed NMSV formation control. A technical obstacle is to isolate the influence of HCCDAs without compromising formation integrality. To deal with this, a weight-based adjacency matrix is developed to dynamically evaluate the formation credibility. It is capable of suppressing the spread of the influence from attacked members throughout the entire formation without severing them. Meanwhile, the consensus over the weights regarding the same member and the natural boundedness of the weights render the weight-based adjacency matrix more readily applicable. Besides, a hierarchical observer is developed to estimate both the matched and mismatched uncertainties stemming from HCCDAs such that attacked members can keep working normally. Accordingly, an anti-HCCDA distributed formation control scheme is synthesized. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is shown by the robustness and comparison simulations.