Adaptive Control for Uncertain Nonlinear Systems Against DoS Attacks Using Quantized Output Only and Application to a Single-Link Robot

This paper investigates the problem of adaptive output feedback control for uncertain nonlinear systems with input/output quantization subject to intermittent denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. When a DoS attack becomes active, the system is unable to obtain output signal. In order to address this challenge, we compensate the output signal by introducing an attack compensator. At the same time, a novel quantization compensator-based (QC) state observer is designed, which uses only the quantized compensated signal to reconstruct the system states. In addition, the problem of over-parameterisation is avoided by using parameter projection technique to design the parameter estimator. By combining Lyapunov stability theory and a modified average dwell time (ADT) approach, the stability of the closed-loop system is ensured. Furthermore, the proposed controller ensures that all closed-loop signals are bounded, and the control performance of mean-square error can be adjusted by appropriately selecting certain design parameters. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is validated through a single-link robot simulation results.
Note to Practitioners
—Considering that resources are limited, the DoS attacks mentioned in this paper are aperiodic, which means that attackers engage in frequent attacks within a relatively short time frame. This aligns more closely with real-world scenarios of network attacks. When the attack is active, the output signal is not available for the system. In this paper, a new QC state observer is designed, which in turn enables the estimation of the system state signals. Furthermore, this paper considers both input and output quantization, which reduces duplicate transmission of samples and improves the use of communication resources. This makes the work in this paper more relevant to the practical engineering context.