Integrated Fault Estimation and Fault-Tolerant Tracking Control for Unmanned Surface Vessels Under Connectivity-Hybrid Cyber-Attacks

This study aims to tackle the tracking control problem of multiple unmanned surface vessels (USVs). It considers the impact of connectivity-hybrid cyber-attacks in the networked level, and wave-induced disturbances, as well as severe and nonsevere unified modeling rudder angle faults in the physical level. To do this, the study establishes USV models, taking into account actuator fault and cyber-attack modeling. It then presents the augmented estimator-based decentralized fault estimation (FE) and leader-following consensus-based distributed fault-tolerant tracking control (FTTC) protocols. These are incorporated into an integrated structure that ensures the robust asymptotic convergence of estimation errors and excellent tracking performance of multi-USVs. Finally, the study derives criteria for an exponential tracking of composite faulty multi-USVs under cyber-attacks using dual-constraint restriction (attack frequency and excitation rate). Comparative simulations substantiate the advantage of the developed integrated FE and FTTC scheme.