Secure Coordination Control of Networked Robotic Systems: From a Control Theory Perspective

As one of the core equipments and actuators, robotic technology has attracted much attention and has made great progress. However, a single robotic system is often unable to handle complex tasks due to limitations in sensors, microprocessors, actuators, and the ability to handle complex situations. With the development of distributed control and microprocessing technology, networked robotic systems have greatly expanded their perceptual, computational, and execution capabilities, with high efficiency, low cost, and strong functionality advantages. As a typical distributed cyber-physical system (DCPS), which is an intelligent system that integrates computing, communication, and control, networked robotic systems can perform higher-level tasks by sharing information and working together. It can provide intelligent control and monitoring of a physical process, such as environment observation, information collection, and search and rescue, etc. Thus, coordination control of networked robotic systems has become the focus of scholars worldwide. However, the sensing, communication, and control integration of networked robotic systems make them face unprecedented network security threats, in which cyber attacks have become a major hidden danger to the reliable operation of autonomous unmanned systems. Although existing control methods can achieve swarm collaborative control of networked robotic systems, the protection of which, especially the security of control systems, is rarely addressed.

In this book, we conduct research on the secure coordination problem of networked robotic systems from a control theory perspective, given the limited communication bandwidth and the increasingly prominent network security threats. This book showcases several continuous-time and event-triggered secure control design and analysis methods for networked robotic systems under different types of cyberattacks. Additionally, several future research directions are provided for networked robotic systems. This book will be an important reference for scientists, engineers, and graduate students from the field of underwater robotic technologies, maritime science, and control engineering.

Xiaolei Li received the BEng and PhD degree in control engineering from Yanshan University, China, in 2012 and 2018, respectively. From September 2018 to March 2022, he acted as a research fellow in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He joined the Yanshan University in August 2022, where he is currently an associate professor. He received the Best Paper Award of the 16th Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications ICIEA 2021. His current research interests include secure localization and formation control of underwater robotic systems and cyber security of underwater cyber-physical systems. He is now serving as an associate editor of the Journal of Control and Decision. He has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers in leading academic journals and conferences.

Jiange Wang received the BEng and PhD degree in control science and engineering from Yanshan University, China, in 2013and 2020, respectively. From July 2018 to September 2020, she was an exchange PhD student in National University of Singapore, Singapore. From 2021 to 2022, she was a research fellow with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Yeungnam University, South Korea. She is currently an associate professor at the School of Electrical Engineering, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao, China. Her research interests include cooperative control for multi-agent systems and intelligent transportation system.

Xiaoyuan Luo received the MEng degree and the PhD degree from the Institute of Electrical Engineering, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao, China, in 2001 and 2004, respectively. He is currently a professor with Yanshan University. His research interests include intelligent transportation control systems, cyber security for cyber-physical systems, and multiagent and networked control systems. He has received an excellence advisor from the Oceanology International Underwater Robot Competition in 2017.

Xinping Guan is currently a chair professor with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, where he is also the deputy director of the University Research Management Office and the director of the Key Laboratory of Systems Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education of China. Before that, he was a professor and the dean of Electrical Engineering, Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao, China. He is the leader of the prestigious innovative research team of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). He has authored and/or coauthored four research monographs, more than 270 research papers. His current research interests include industrial cyber-physical systems, wireless networking and applications in smart city and smart factory, and underwater sensor networks. Dr. Guan was a recipient of the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems Outstanding Paper Award in 2008.