Secure Formation Control for Heterogeneous UAV-UGV System With Switching Topologies Under Injection Attacks

This article investigates secure formation control of a heterogeneous multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) system (HMUUS) under nonidentical malicious injection attacks and switching topologies. A unified motion description framework is established to address the system's heterogeneity. By decomposing attacked output signals into nonattacked and attack-related components, two observers are designed to estimate the leader and follower states based solely on nonattacked components, while simultaneously estimating the attack signal for each agent. Based on the estimated states, a distributed controller is designed to ensure that HMUUS can achieve formation. Sufficient conditions are derived to ensure the monotonic decrease of the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional (LKF) over the entire time domain of HMUUS with communication delays by constructing a piecewise linear time-varying LKF, which significantly reduces conservatism. Simulations and experiments for the HMUUS are conducted to validate the formation under switching topologies and injection attacks.