Coordinated path following control for multi-unmanned surface vehicles with specified performance and periodic event-triggered mechanism

Abstract

This paper addresses coordinated path following for underactuated multi-unmanned surface vehicles (MUSVs) with specified performance (SP) under the lumped disturbances, proposes a novel adaptive periodic event-triggered path following control strategy via relative threshold event-triggered mechanism. First, the MUSVs communicates through the directed topology cooperative control structure, and maintains a safe distance between each USV along one curve. Meanwhile, the transformed error function is applied to establish the position errors constraint, guaranteeing that the position error of each USV is confined within the specified performance in guidance system. Then, RBF neural network and adaptive parameter method are applied to estimate the lumped disturbances and its error boundary, which makes MUSVs’ coordinated system have strong anti-disturbance ability. Besides, periodic event-triggered control base on relative threshold is introduced, which not only reduces the update frequency of controller and energy consumption, also avoids Zeno behavior phenomenon. Stability analysis proves that coordinated path following control system is uniformly ultimately bounded. Comparative simulations reveal the effectiveness of the coordinated path following control scheme.