Adaptive Containment Control of Multiple Underactuated Hovercrafts Subjected to Switching and Directed Topologies

Abstract

This article addresses the containment control for a group of uncertain underactuated hovercrafts with multiple leaders and switching directed topologies. The underactuated hovercrafts in question are underactuated, nonholonomic, and passively unstable. For such nonlinear systems, we apply the reduced-order method, time-varying approach, adaptive tool, and state transformation technique to derive a novel dynamic feedback control strategy that guarantees all hovercrafts in the group globally converge into the convex hull spanned by leaders. In particular, the proposed containment control algorithm allows the leader trajectories to be either feasible or nonfeasible, and either dynamic or stationary. The Lyapunov stability theory is applied to the closed-loop analysis. Numerical simulations illustrate the control design.