Resilient adaptive leader-following consensus of multiple uncertain Euler–Lagrange systems under disturbances and DoS attacks

Purpose This study aims to propose a resilient adaptive control strategy for multiple uncertain Euler–Lagrange (E–L) systems subject to external disturbances, aperiodic sampling communication and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, aiming to achieve leader-following consensus under these compound constraints. Design/methodology/approach A resilient distributed observer is constructed to estimate the leader’s state using sampled output information over directed networks. An adaptive control protocol combined with parametric update laws is developed for consensus tracking. Findings Theoretical analysis verifies that the proposed adaptive control protocol asymptotically achieves leader-following consensus, without accurately identifying unknown parameters and external disturbances. Originality/value This paper derives the bounds of aperiodic sampling intervals and the corresponding resilience condition against DoS attacks, which guarantees reliable distributed estimation under DoS attacks. Unlike conventional approaches, this paper relaxes traditional conservative constraints: sampling is aperiodic, disturbances are piecewise continuous and their upper bounds need not be known in advance.