Distributed finite‐time adaptive fault‐tolerant consensus control of second‐order multi‐agent systems under deception attacks

Summary This study addresses the issue of distributed fault‐tolerant consensus control for second‐order multi‐agent systems subject to simultaneous actuator bias faults in the physical layer and deception attacks in the cyber layer. Cyber‐physical threats (malicious state‐coupled nonlinear attacks and physical deflection faults), unknown control gains, external disturbances and uncertainties force the failure of the existing graph theory‐based consensus control schemes, leading to disruptions in the cooperation and coordination of multi‐agent systems. Then, the power integrator‐based virtual control is incorporated in the distributed fault‐tolerant consensus to achieve unknown parameter estimations with the adaptive technique. The consensus‐based robustness to lumped uncertainties, resilience to attacks, compensation to faults, and novel finite‐time convergence of the neighborhood errors and velocity errors are also realized within a prescribed finite‐time settling bound. The simulation is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the distributed finite‐time adaptive fault‐tolerant consensus algorithm.