Fault-tolerant flocking control against multiple malicious agents under geometric configuration containment

Flocking control in the presence of malicious decisions is a crucial research topic since agents in swarms are likely to suffer from security issues in practice. This paper considers a swarm containing malicious agents that deliberately alter their controller parameters and disrupt the swarm by causing collisions, divisions, and escapes. Two possible malicious scenarios are considered. The first is that one malicious agent acts selectively on a subset of its neighbors and the second is that multiple malicious agents are either scattered or clustered together. To achieve the flocking control objective: (1) containment conditions based on specific geometric configurations are established; (2) hierarchical fault-tolerant flocking control methods based on those containment conditions are proposed. Compared to existing research dealing with malicious agents in swarms, our approach aims to contain rather than remove them. This guarantees the completeness of the task and takes agents’ motions into consideration. Simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.