Distributed control of multi-UAV networks with ranging-based estimation in presence of jamming attacks

Communications between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are vulnerable to jamming attacks from even novoice attackers due to the openness of wireless networks. As a result, UAVs under attack may lose contact with others and hence lose control. In this paper, we investigate a secure distributed control problem for UAVs in presence of jamming attacks. The main idea is to make use of additional but coarse ranging information between neighbors to dynamically estimate the states of neighbors and make control decisions based on the estimates. Since neighbors' information is unavailable for those communication-blocked UAVs, we develop the estimator based on UKF with noise estimation, where the control decisions of neighbors are viewed as noises. By doing so, UAVs under attack are able to roughly catch up with others, thus maintain a certain level of formation quality before communications are recovered. We conduct simulations to validate the proposed method.