Optimization of Operational Parameters of Plant Protection UAV.

The operational parameters of plant protection unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) significantly impact spraying effectiveness, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. This paper conducted a full factorial experiment with varying flight speeds, heights, and nozzle flow rates to collect parameter space data. Using the Kriging surrogate model, we characterized this parameter space and subsequently optimized the average deposition rate and coefficient of variation by employing a variable crossover (mutation) probability multi-objective genetic algorithm. In the obtained Pareto front, the average sedimentation rate is no less than 46%, with a maximum of 56.08%, and the CV coefficient is no more than 13.91%, with a minimum of only 8.42%. These optimized parameters enhance both the average deposition rate and spraying uniformity compared to experimental data. By employing these optimized parameters in practical applications, a balance between the maximum average deposition rate and minimum coefficient of variation can be achieved during UAV spraying, thereby reducing pesticide usage, promoting sustainable agriculture, and mitigating instances of missed spraying and re-spraying.

Resilient Output Containment Control of Heterogeneous Multiagent Systems Against Composite Attacks: A Digital Twin Approach.

This article delves into the distributed resilient output containment control of heterogeneous multiagent systems against composite attacks, including Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, false-data injection (FDI) attacks, camouflage attacks, and actuation attacks. Inspired by digital twin technology, a twin layer (TL) with higher security and privacy is employed to decouple the above problem into two tasks: 1) defense protocols against DoS attacks on TL and 2) defense protocols against actuation attacks on the cyber-physical layer (CPL). Initially, considering modeling errors of leader dynamics, distributed observers are introduced to reconstruct the leader dynamics for each follower on TL under DoS attacks. Subsequently, distributed estimators are utilized to estimate follower states based on the reconstructed leader dynamics on the TL. Then, decentralized solvers are designed to calculate the output regulator equations on CPL by using the reconstructed leader dynamics. Simultaneously, decentralized adaptive attack-resilient control schemes are proposed to resist unbounded actuation attacks on the CPL. Furthermore, the aforementioned control protocols are applied to demonstrate that the followers can achieve uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB) convergence, with the upper bound of the UUB convergence being explicitly determined. Finally, we present a simulation example and an experiment to show the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Formation-Containment Control of High-Order Multiagent Systems With Observer-Type Protocols.

The analysis and design problems of formation-containment control for high-order linear time-invariant (LTI) multiagent systems (MASs) on directed graphs with observer-based output-feedback protocols are given in this work. To expand the feasibility of state formation configuration, two well-structured compensation signals are introduced for the leaders and followers in the protocols, respectively. Benefitting from the compensation signal of followers, the decoupling between formation control of leaders and containment control of followers is achieved. Thus, a necessary and sufficient condition is first established such that the formation-containment control for high-order LTI MASs can be achieved. Moreover, a heuristic iterative algorithm is developed to compute the controller gains, observer gains, as well as the compensation signals. Finally, two numerical examples are implemented to illustrate the time-varying formation-containment control of high-order MASs, which shows the validity and practicability of the theoretical results and algorithm.

Positivity and Stability Analysis of T-S Fuzzy Descriptor Systems With Bounded and Unbounded Time-Varying Delays.

This work focuses on the stability analysis of positive Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy descriptor systems with time-varying delays. An equivalent augmented system is constructed to investigate the positivity and stability of T-S fuzzy descriptor time-delay systems. By using this transformed system, a necessary and sufficient positivity condition is first derived for systems, which can be verified by linear programming (LP). Then, based on the positivity of T-S fuzzy descriptor systems, a sufficient condition is put forward for the asymptotic stability of systems with bounded and unbounded time-varying delays. Finally, several examples are provided to show the effectiveness of the obtained results.

Consensus of Positive Networked Systems on Directed Graphs.

This article addresses the distributed consensus problem for identical continuous-time positive linear systems with state-feedback control. Existing works of such a problem mainly focus on the case where the networked communication topologies are of either undirected and incomplete graphs or strongly connected directed graphs. On the other hand, in this work, the communication topologies of the networked system are described by directed graphs each containing a spanning tree, which is a more general and new scenario due to the interplay between the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix and the controller gains. Specifically, the problem involves complex eigenvalues, the Hurwitzness of complex matrices, and positivity constraints, which make analysis difficult in the Laplacian matrix. First, a necessary and sufficient condition for the consensus analysis of directed networked systems with positivity constraints is given, by using positive systems theory and graph theory. Unlike the general Riccati design methods that involve solving an algebraic Riccati equation (ARE), a condition represented by an algebraic Riccati inequality (ARI) is obtained for the existence of a solution. Subsequently, an equivalent condition, which corresponds to the consensus design condition, is derived, and a semidefinite programming algorithm is developed. It is shown that, when a protocol is solved by the algorithm for the networked system on a specific communication graph, there exists a set of graphs such that the positive consensus problem can be solved as well.

Reachable Set Estimation and Synthesis for Periodic Positive Systems.

This paper investigates the problems of reachable set estimation and synthesis for periodic positive systems with two different exogenous disturbances. The lifting method and the pseudoperiodic Lyapunov function method are adopted for the estimation problem. The reachable set bounding conditions are proposed by employing Lyapunov-based inequalities and the S-procedure technique. Two optimization methods are used to minimize the bounding hyper-pyramids of the reachable set. In addition, the state-feedback controller design conditions that make the reachable set of closed-loop systems lie within a given hyper-pyramid are derived. Finally, numerical examples are presented to illustrate the validity of the obtained conditions.