Distributed Affine Formation Maneuver Control of Autonomous Surface Vehicles With Event-Triggered Data Transmission Mechanism

Abstract

This article investigates the distributed affine formation maneuver control for collaborative autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) systems with the event-triggered data transmission mechanism among inter-ASVs. To achieve preset arbitrary configuration transformations in the case where the formation knowledge is assigned to only a part of ASVs, the affine image is employed to describe desired configurations. To ensure position and attitude configuration rigidities simultaneously, a synthetical constraint composed of the Laplacian matrices and the stress matrices is constructed. Besides, an algebraic relation between the synthetical constraint and the formation tracking error is established. The above tools enable the sliding mode technology to be used to the affine formation maneuver control of collaborative ASVs systems. It follows that a novel distributed event-triggered affine formation maneuver control scheme is developed for the collaborative ASVs systems. The advantages of the proposed control scheme are threefold: 1) the distributed affine formation maneuver control of collaborative second-order vehicles systems is achieved with changeable formation velocities and orientations; 2) the existing literatures adapt to developing the second-order distributed affine formation maneuver control based on the backstepping philosophy. In contrast, the sliding manifold replaces the backstepping philosophy here. Since the complexity explosion is circumvented, the proposed control scheme is relatively simple; and 3) the event-triggered data transmission mechanism among inter-ASVs is introduced, and neighbor velocities and accelerations are omitted for the control implementation. As a consequence, the communication resource usage can be reduced. Finally, the semi-physical simulations are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.