Distributed Resilient Control for Autonomous Surface Vehicles via Self-Triggered Communication Under Denial-of-Service Attacks

This paper studies networked autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) in the presence of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, namely attacks that restrain transmissions over the communication network. The control objective is to design an intermittent communication proposal such that, during a DoS attack, transmits only the neighbors’ pre-attack state information, thus reducing communication frequency while maintaining system stability. Particularly, a resilient self-triggered mechanism is developed to reduce unnecessary data transmission between agents through energy-limited and frail networks. Unlike event-triggered methods, the self-triggered condition depends only on the system’s current state, which eliminates the need for continuous state monitoring. Based on that, a distributed resilient controller is then devised via backstepping frame. Rigorous stability analysis shows that all signals in the closed-loop system are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control protocol.