Abstract
This paper addressed the formation control problem of surface unmanned vessels with model uncertainty, parameter perturbation, and unknown environmental disturbances. A formation control method based on the control force saturation constraint and the extended state observer (ESO) was proposed. Compared with the control methods which only consider the disturbances from external environment, the method proposed in this paper took model uncertainties, parameter perturbation, and external environment disturbances as the compound disturbances, and the ESO was used to estimate and compensate for the disturbances, which improved the anti-disturbance performance of the controller. The formation controller was designed with the virtual leader strategy, and backstepping technique was designed with saturation constraint (SC) function to avoid the lack of force of the actuator. The stability of the closed-loop system was analyzed with the Lyapunov method, and it was proved that the whole system is uniformly and ultimately bounded. The tracking error can converge to arbitrarily small by choosing reasonable controller parameters. The comparison and analysis of simulation experiments showed that the controller designed in this paper had strong anti-disturbance and anti-saturation performance to the compound disturbances of vessels and can effectively complete the formation control.
Highlights
In recent years, with the continuous progress of science and technology, the formation control of autonomous unmanned systems (AUSs) has become a new topic in the field of control research [1]
Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) [2], autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) [3], mobile robots [4], and unmanned vessels [5] can be regarded as AUSs [6]
Formation control can be applied to rescue missions, exploration of natural resources, environmental monitoring, vessel replenishment, etc
Summary
With the continuous progress of science and technology, the formation control of autonomous unmanned systems (AUSs) has become a new topic in the field of control research [1]. In actual engineering practice, the forces and torques provided by the actuator have output constraints, which may not satisfy the design requirement If such situation occurs, it will affect the stability of the formation and fail to complete the assigned task, and may cause collision between vessels. Based on the analysis of the above literatures, this paper adopted the ESO to estimate the model uncertainty, internal parameter perturbations, and external environmental disturbances of unmanned surface vessels. According to the literature analysis [30,31,32,33,34,35], the formation control problem of multi-unmanned surface vessels under actuator saturation constraint is further studied in this paper.
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