Fixed-Time Resilient Edge-Triggered Estimation and Control of Surface Vehicles for Cooperative Target Tracking Under Attacks

This paper is concerned with the cooperative target tracking of under-actuated unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) with event-triggered communications subject to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The target position information can be sensed by a fraction of follower USVs only. A fixed-time resilient cooperative edge-triggered estimation and control architecture is presented for achieving cooperative target tracking under DoS attacks. Specifically, a distributed edge-triggered fixed-time extended state observer (ESO) is designed to recover the position and velocity of the target with a prescribed time regardless of the unreliable communication network subject to DoS attacks. Moreover, the communication burden of the network is reduced by the proposed edge-triggered mechanism. In the control law design, a fixed-time ESO is designed for estimating the model uncertainties and external disturbances in an earth-fixed reference frame. Then, a fixed-time target tracking control law is proposed for each follower USV based on the fixed-time ESO. It is proven that the error signals in the closed-loop control system of USVs are convergent to the origin in a fixed time. An example is provided to substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed fixed-time resilient cooperative edge-triggered estimation and control architecture for USVs.