Fixed-time coordinated guidance for containment maneuvering of unmanned surface vehicles under delayed communications: Theory and experiment

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to develop a new cooperative controller to solve the containment maneuvering problem for multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) that track one parameterized path in a fixed time. The required velocities and heading angles of the USVs are designed based on Line-of-Sight (LOS) guidance laws. To steer along-track errors and cross-track errors to certain sets in fixed time, the coordinated guidance laws are derived by tan-type barrier Lyapunov functions (BLFs). For the coordination level, time-delayed coordination update laws are proposed for containment maneuvering. Comparing with the current containment maneuvering, the main features are: (i) LOS-based guidance laws are improved with the performance of fixed-time convergence, the convergence time can be determined by user-defined time; (ii) A novel containment maneuvering path variable controller is derived with time delays and without the assumption of setting individual paths following errors to be 0. (iii) the advantages of the proposed containment maneuvering control strategy are illustrated both through theoretical analysis and experimental result.