Distributed resilient formation control of heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems under denial-of-service attacks

This article studies the distributed resilient formation control problem of heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems under denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. We first develop an internal reference model to provide virtual reference signals for individual agents subject to DoS attacks. Based on this internal reference model, two novel distributed resilient controllers consisting of both state feedback and output feedback types are proposed via the feedforward method. In addition, the complex Laplacian-based method is employed to tackle the concerned formation control problem. It is proved that under these two proposed distributed resilient controllers, the resulting closed-loop multi-agent systems with DoS attacks can achieve a moving formation of the desired shape. Two simulation examples are lastly provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed controllers. © 2026 Elsevier B.V.