Distributed Secure Observer‐Based Adaptive Consensus Tracking Control for Uncertain Non‐Linear Multi‐Agent Systems Under Dos Attacks

ABSTRACT In this paper, we investigate the adaptive secure consensus tracking control problem for a class of heterogeneous non‐linear multi‐agent systems with uncertain time‐varying parameters against denial of service (DoS) attacks. Under DoS attacks, where the leader's dynamics and states are only known to a subset of the followers (subsystems), achieving leader‐following consensus poses a significant challenge, as not all followers can obtain the reference signal in this case. To solve this issue, a novel distributed fixed‐time estimator is designed to estimate the uncertainties involved in the leader's dynamics. By applying average dwell time theory and switching mechanism, a distributed resilient observer is designed to obtain the leader's states without any global information under the threat of attacks. Subsequently, an adaptive backstepping‐based controller is designed to achieve consensus tracking for a class of high‐order non‐linear systems with time‐varying uncertain parameters. It is demonstrated that, if the attack duration meets the specified limits, all estimation errors of the leader's dynamics converge to zero within a fixed time, and all observation and tracking errors remain globally uniformly bounded. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.