Distributed control under compromised measurements:Resilient estimation, attack detection, and vehicle platooning

TL;DR

This paper develops a resilient distributed control architecture for vehicle groups that maintains accurate state estimation and formation despite sensor attacks, using a combination of attack detection and adaptive estimation techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a novel architecture combining resilient observers, attack detectors, and controllers for secure vehicle platooning under sensor compromise.

Findings

The detector can identify attacked and attack-free sensors in finite time.

The observer provides real-time and asymptotic error bounds, improving with sensor identification.

The distributed controller guarantees closed-loop stability under attack conditions.

Abstract

We study how to design a secure observer-based distributed controller such that a group of vehicles can achieve accurate state estimates and formation control even if the measurements of a subset of vehicle sensors are compromised by a malicious attacker. We propose an architecture consisting of a resilient observer, an attack detector, and an observer-based distributed controller. The distributed detector is able to update three sets of vehicle sensors: the ones surely under attack, surely attack-free, and suspected to be under attack. The adaptive observer saturates the measurement innovation through a preset static or time-varying threshold, such that the potentially compromised measurements have limited influence on the estimation. Essential properties of the proposed architecture include: 1) The detector is fault-free, and the attacked and attack-free vehicle sensors can be identified in finite time; 2) The observer guarantees both real-time error bounds and asymptotic error bounds, with tighter bounds when more attacked or attack-free vehicle sensors are identified by the detector; 3) The distributed controller ensures closed-loop stability. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is evaluated through simulations by an application to vehicle platooning.