  One salient feature of cooperative formation tracking is its distributed
nature that relies on localized control and information sharing over a sparse
communication network. That is, a distributed control manner could be prone to
malicious attacks and unreliable communication that deteriorate the formation
tracking performance or even destabilize the whole multi-agent system. This
paper studies a safe and reliable time-varying output formation tracking
problem of linear multi-agent systems, where an attacker adversely injects any
unbounded time-varying signals (false data injection (FDI) attacks), while an
interruption of communication channels between the agents is caused by an
unreliable network. Both characteristics improve the practical relevance of the
problem to be addressed, which poses some technical challenges to the
distributed algorithm design and stability analysis. To mitigate the adverse
effect, a novel resilient distributed control architecture is established to
guarantee time-varying output formation tracking exponentially. The key
features of the proposed framework are threefold: 1) an observer-based
identifier is integrated to compensate for adverse effects; 2) a reliable
distributed algorithm is proposed to deal with time-varying topologies caused
by unreliable communication; and 3) in contrast to the existing remedies that
deal with attacks as bounded disturbances/faults with known knowledge, we
propose resilience strategies to handle unknown and unbounded attacks for
exponential convergence of dynamic formation tracking errors, whereas most of
existing results achieve uniformly ultimately boundedness (UUB) results.
Numerical simulations are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed
design.
