Defense Strategies for Autonomous Multi-agent Systems: Ensuring Safety and Resilience Under Exponentially Unbounded FDI Attacks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel safety-aware and attack-resilient control framework for autonomous multi-agent systems under severe false data injection attacks, ensuring safety and mission continuity.

Contribution

It introduces a new attack-resilient observer, compensational control signals, and a safety-certified controller solving a quadratic programming problem for collision avoidance.

Findings

The SAAR controller effectively maintains safety under EU-FDI attacks.

The attack-resilient observer defends against severe data injection attacks.

Simulation demonstrates applicability in complex 3D multi-agent scenarios.

Abstract

False data injection attacks pose a significant threat to autonomous multi-agent systems (MASs). Existing attack-resilient control strategies generally have strict assumptions on the attack signals and overlook safety constraints, such as collision avoidance. In practical applications, leader agents equipped with advanced sensors or weaponry span a safe region to guide heterogeneous follower agents, ensuring coordinated operations while addressing collision avoidance to prevent financial losses and mission failures. This letter addresses these gaps by introducing and solving the safety-aware and attack-resilient (SAAR) control problem under exponentially unbounded false data injection (EU-FDI) attacks. Specifically, a novel attack-resilient observer layer (OL) is first designed to defend against EU-FDI attacks on the OL. Then, an attack-resilient compensational signal is designed to mitigate the adverse effects caused by the EU-FDI attack on control input layer (CIL). Finally, a SAAR controller is designed by solving a quadratic programming (QP) problem integrating control barrier function (CBF) certified collision-free safety constraints. Rigorous Lyapunov-based stability analysis certifies the SAAR controller's effectiveness in ensuring both safety and resilience. This study also pioneers a three-dimensional (3D) simulation of the SAAR containment control problem for heterogeneous MASs, demonstrating its applicability in realistic multi-agent scenarios.