Cooperative Enclosing Control With Modified Guaranteed Performance and Aperiodic Communication for Unmanned Vehicles: A Path-Following Solution

Abstract

Existing cooperative enclosing outcomes are primarily conducted relying on continuous transmission flow among agents, and transient specifications are not explicitly incorporated into the design, which may consume a large amount of communication resources and violate the preset transient constraints. To address abovementioned issues, by resorting to a path-following framework, this paper proposes a novel cooperative enclosing control with aperiodic communication and modified guaranteed performance for unmanned vehicles, consisting of communication and guidance levels. At communication level, by constructing an event-triggered rule and a continuous-time state predictor, an aperiodic communication tactic is established to mitigate the real-time transmission cost of network medium and obviate unnecessary resource wastage. At guidance level, a modified guaranteed performance control (MGPC) with the deployment of novel unsymmetrical envelopes is proposed to prescribe path-following errors within user-defined constraints while excluding any overshoots. The striking innovation includes two aspects, one is that by utilizing the aperiodic communication tactic, transmission data amount among multiple vehicles in experimental results can be reduced by approximately 54.7% compared with the time-triggered alternative, another is that the performance guarantees (e.g., overshoot-free property and preassigned convergence rate) can be retained by resorting to suggested MGPC. All deviations of the entire system are analyzed to be constrained without triggering Zeno behaviors. The effectiveness is further validated by simulation and experimental outcomes.