Distributed Detection of Adversarial Attacks for Resilient Cooperation of Multirobot Systems With Intermittent Communication

This article concerns the consensus and formation of a network of mobile autonomous agents in adversarial settings where a group of malicious (compromised) agents is subject to deception attacks. In addition, the communication network is arbitrarily time-varying and subject to intermittent connections, possibly imposed by denial-of-service attacks. We provide explicit bounds for network connectivity in an integral sense, enabling the characterization of the system’s resilience to specific classes of adversarial attacks. We also show that under the condition of connectivity in an integral sense uniformly in time, the system is finite-gain \mathcal {L}_{p} stable, and uniformly exponentially fast consensus and formation are achievable, provided malicious agents are detected and isolated from the network. We present a distributed and reconfigurable framework with theoretical guarantees for detecting malicious agents, allowing for the resilient cooperation of the remaining cooperative agents. Finally, simulation studies illustrate the theoretical findings.