Fully Distributed and Cyber-Attack-Immune Cooperative Output Regulation by Linear Time-Varying Protocols

This paper delves into the study of the linear cooperative output regulation problem for multiple heterogeneous agents with a general directed topology, emphasizing on its cyber-attack-immune and fully distributed characteristics. For a class of introspective multiagent systems in which the agents have the ability to measure their own output, several distributed observer-based linear time-varying protocols are introduced. These protocols utilize only absolute and relative output information from onboard sensors, thereby eliminating the requirement for information exchange through the communication network and ensuring the immunity of the closed-loop system to cyber-attacks. In addition, the proposed protocols operate in a fully distributed manner, which makes them resilient to changes in the topology map. To ensure the stability of the closed-loop system, the protocol parameters are meticulously selected by using the Lyapunov function-based time-varying system analysis method. By imposing certain assumptions on the systems, this result is also extended to the general scenario where the agents exhibit non-introspective characteristics and lack the ability to access their absolute output information. In this case, a sufficient condition is derived for the solvability of the cooperative output regulation problem, with a control protocol designed to address the problem. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. © 2026 IEEE.