Distributed Resilient Source Seeking of Multirobot Systems Under Mixed Cyberattacks

This article investigates resilient source seeking problem of second-order multirobot systems (MRSs) under mixed cyberattacks, which consist of misbehaving and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. The misbehaving attacks can cover several types of malicious attacks, such as false data injection, stubborn, and Byzantine, while the network connectivity may be compromised by DoS attacks, potentially resulting in a time-varying and disconnected digraph. To this end, a resilient source seeking algorithm is proposed by designing an auxiliary point for each agent such that the coordination problem is transformed into a point tracking one. A reference velocity is calculated to guide benign robots toward the source, leveraging their historically optimal positions with the highest signal strength. This ensures the auxiliary points converge to the source, clustering benign robots nearby. When DoS attacks occur on some edges, the latest sampling data acquired before the attacks is used to hold the control signals for the robots. Then, sufficient conditions are established through rigorous stability analysis. In comparison to existing methods, the proposed approach extends the safe-kernel-based resilient consensus algorithms to a resilient source seeking algorithm for a general discrete-time second-order dynamics, while also can withstand a mixed cyberattack comprising both misbehaving and DoS attacks. Finally, simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.