Dynamic quantized consensus under DoS attacks: Towards a tight zooming-out factor

This paper deals with dynamic quantized consensus of dynamical agents in a general form under packet losses induced by Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. The communication channel has limited bandwidth and hence the transmitted signals over the network are subject to quantization. To deal with agent's output, an observer is implemented at each node. The state of the observer is quantized by a finite-level quantizer and then transmitted over the network. To solve the problem of quantizer overflow under malicious packet losses, a zooming-in and out dynamic quantization mechanism is designed. By the new quantized controller proposed in the paper, the zooming-out factor is lower bounded by the spectral radius of the agent's dynamic matrix. A sufficient condition of quantization range is provided under which the finite-level quantizer is free of overflow. A sufficient condition of tolerable DoS attacks for achieving consensus is also provided. At last, we study scalar dynamical agents as a special case and further tighten the zooming-out factor to a value smaller than the agent's dynamic parameter. Under such a zooming-out factor, it is possible to recover the level of tolerable DoS attacks to that of unquantized consensus, and the quantizer is free of overflow

Practical output consensus of nonlinear heterogeneous multi-agent systems with limited data rate

This paper investigates the consensus problem for nonlinear heterogeneous multi-agent systems with limited communication data rate. Each agent is modeled by a higher-order strict-feedback continuous-time system with unknown nonlinearities and external disturbance, and only the first state variable being measurable. Extended state observers (ESOs) are used to estimate the unmeasurable agent states and the unknown nonlinear dynamics. An ESO-based distributed output feedback protocol with dynamic encoding and decoding is then presented. It is shown that, for a connected undirected network, the proposed protocol guarantees practical output consensus, in which the steady-state consensus error can be made arbitrarily small. The ESO-based protocol also shapes the transient consensus performance, as it is capable of recovering the consensus performance of a linear counterpart with fully measurable states. Furthermore, we prove that for higher-order uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems, consensus can be achieved with merely one bit information exchange between each pair of adjacent agents at each time step. Finally, simulations on third-order pendulum systems are given, which verify the theoretical results

A new extended state observer for uncertain nonlinear systems

Extended state observer (ESO) is a class of high-gain observers and a powerful tool for output feedback control of uncertain nonlinear systems. In this paper, we propose a new ESO design technique which is based on cascading a series of first-order ESOs. Benefited from the cascade design, saturations can be inserted into the observer internal variables to limit the maximal implemented gain. The convergence of the new ESO with a class of nonlinear gain functions is established, and it is shown that adopting appropriate nonlinear gain mechanisms leads to improvement in measurement noise tolerance. What is more, the new ESO based output feedback control has stronger uncertainty estimation and compensation capability than the standard ESO based output feedback control. Specifically, the proposed approach only relies on the knowledge of the control direction of the uncertain nonlinear system. Finally, the obtained results are applied to suppress the wing rock motion of a slender delta wing

An Improved Antiwindup Design Using an Anticipatory Loop and an Immediate Loop

We present an improved antiwindup design for linear invariant continuous-time systems with actuator saturation nonlinearities. In the improved approach, two antiwindup compensators are simultaneously designed: one activated immediately at the occurrence of actuator saturation and the other activated in anticipatory of actuator saturation. Both the static and dynamic antiwindup compensators are considered. Sufficient conditions for global stability and minimizing the induced L2 gain are established, in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). We also show that the feasibility of the improved antiwindup is similar to the traditional antiwindup. Benefits of the proposed approach over the traditional antiwindup and a recent innovative antiwindup are illustrated with well-known examples