Distributed output‐feedback containment control for UAV swarm with input saturation under distributed DoS attacks

Abstract In this paper, output‐feedback containment control problem of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm with input saturation is studied under distributed denial of service (DoS) attacks. Any edge in the communication network may be attacked independently. The considered distributed DoS attack may occur at any time, and there is no limit to the number of DoS attacks, which is more in line with the actual attack scenario. The leader UAVs are noncooperative, which are embedded with unknown input. Firstly, to estimate the state signals, distributed observers are designed. Then, a general form of distributed DoS attack model is established. To deal with distributed DoS attacks, compensators are constructed for each follower UAV to estimate its neighbor signals when DoS attacks occur. The compensator calibration mechanism is introduced to calibrate the estimated values once the communication is restored. In this way, the flexible switching between the estimated values and the real values is realized to improve the ability to respond to DoS attacks. Then, an auxiliary system is designed to cope with the possible input saturation phenomenon. Finally, a novel variable‐gain distributed containment control law is proposed, based on a quadratic term of the adaptive parameter, which shortens the convergence time and reduces the steady‐state error. It is proved that the proposed scheme ensures that all the state errors, including containment error, observation error, adaptive parameter, and auxiliary variable, are uniformly ultimately bounded, and the effectiveness and superiority are verified by simulation experiments and comparative analyses.