Trust method for multi-agent consensus

Abstract

The consensus problem in multi-agent systems often assumes that all agents are equally trustworthy to seek agreement. But for multi-agent military applications - particularly those that deal with sensor fusion or multi-robot formation control - this assumption may create the potential for compromised network security or poor cooperative performance. As such, we present a trust-based solution for the discrete-time multi-agent consensus problem and prove its asymptotic convergence in strongly connected digraphs. The novelty of the paper is a new trust algorithm called RoboTrust, which is used to calculate trustworthiness in agents using observations and statistical inferences from various historical perspectives. The performance of RoboTrust is evaluated within the trust-based consensus protocol under different conditions of tolerance and confirmation.