Event-Triggered and Privacy-Preserving Control for Prescribed-Time Formation of Networked Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Networked Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems require resilient cooperative control to mitigate external disturbances, preserve information privacy, and operate under constrained communication and computational resources, especially in complex and uncertain environments. To satisfy the needs, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving interactive prescribed-time robust formation tracking control scheme based on an event-triggered mechanism. This scheme effectively reduces communication and actuation frequency, thereby minimizing onboard resource consumption and actuator wear. At the interactive level, the Paillier homomorphic encryption strategy is employed to protect the leader’s state estimates, ensuring that encrypted information is transmitted only upon event triggers, thus mitigating the computational burden of high-frequency updates. At the control level, a Sliding Mode Control (SMC)-based prescribed-time tracking controller is designed to achieve robust formation tracking, enhancing resilience against external disturbances and improving adaptability to dynamic and uncertain environments. By cleverly designing event-triggering conditions at both levels, state estimation and formation control are completed within the prescribed time under the event-triggered mechanism, further enhancing environmental adaptability and cooperation task execution efficiency. This paper resolves the coupling issues among the above components, theoretically proving the convergence, privacy, and robustness of the scheme and verifying the effectiveness and comprehensive performance of the proposed scheme through numerical simulation.