Resilient Networking in Formation Flying UAVs

TL;DR

This paper proposes a resilient, fault-tolerant consensus control framework for formation flying UAVs that maintains network connectivity and security against malicious or defective nodes using graph-theoretic properties and distributed algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces a novel resilient consensus algorithm based on network robustness and a distributed control policy to enhance UAV formation security.

Findings

The proposed framework effectively maintains formation despite malicious UAVs.

Numerical examples demonstrate the approach's robustness against cyber threats.

The graph-theoretic analysis provides insights into network resilience and convergence.

Abstract

The threats on cyber-physical system have changed much into a level of sophistication that elude the traditional security and protection methods. This work addresses a proactive approaches to the cyber security of a formation flying UAVs. A resilient formation control of UAVs in the presence of non-cooperative (defective or malicious) UAVs is presented. Based on local information a resilient consensus in the presence of misbehaving nodes is dealt with fault-tolerant consensus algorithm. In the proposed framework, a graph-theoretic property of network robustness conveying the notion of a direct information exchange between two sets of UAVs in the network is introduced to analyze the behavior and convergence of the distributed consensus algorithm. A distributed control policy is developed to maintain the network connectivity threshold to satisfy the topological requirement put forward for the resiliency of the consensus algorithm. Numerical examples are presented to show the applicability of the proactive approach used in dealing with the cyber attack treat on a formation flying UAVs