Resilient Control Lyapunov Function-based Quadratic Program for Quadrotors Under Cyberattacks

Abstract

Ensuring the operational safety of quadrotors under partial actuator failures, lumped external disturbances, and malicious cyberattacks is a critical challenge due to the system's underactuated and highly nonlinear nature. Building on the existing result of a fault-tolerant control approach for a quadrotor experiencing a complete loss of two opposing rotors \cite{chen2024quadrotor}, this letter further addresses the additional challenge of malicious cyberattacks, which could be unknown and unbounded. While the baseline control law, rooted in proportional-derivative (PD) feedback and observer-based decoupling, effectively handles mismatched disturbances, it remains vulnerable to maliciously injected cyberattacks on the pseudo-control channels. To address this, a Resilient Control Lyapunov Function-based Quadratic Program (RCLF-QP) is developed, where a resilient compensational term with real-time online adaptation is designed in the conventional CLF to compensate for the maliciously injected unknown and unbounded attacks. Compared with the PD feedback control, the proposed QP-based constrained optimization control framework provides a systematic and extensible framework that allows new control objectives and constraints to be seamlessly integrated without altering the underlying stability guarantees. The overall proposed controller integrates a model-based extended state observer with the proposed RCLF-QP mechanism to mitigate both lumped disturbances caused by aerodynamics and strong wind, and adversarial cyberattacks injected by malicious adversaries. Simulations in a high-fidelity environment demonstrate that the proposed RCLF-QP control architecture prevents trajectory divergence and system instability in scenarios where the baseline controller fails in maintaining the stability of Quadrotors under malicious attacks.