Distributed Control for Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems Subject to Communication Delays and Cyber-Attacks: Applied to One-Link Manipulators

This note addresses the problem of distributed control for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems over a communication graph. In many real practical systems, owing to communication limits and the vulnerability of communication networks to be overheard and modified by the adversary, consideration of communication delays and cyber-attacks in designing of the controller is important. To consider these challenges, in the presented approach, a distributed controller for a group of one-link flexible joint manipulators is provided which are connected via data delaying communication network in the presence of cyber-attacks. Sufficient conditions are provided to guarantee that the closed-loop system is stable with prescribed disturbance attenuation, and the parameter of the control law can be obtained by solving a set of linear matrix inequities (LMIs). Eventually, simulations results of four single-link manipulators are provided to demonstrate the performance of the introduced method.