Region coverage control for multiple stratospheric airships with combined self-/event-triggered mechanism

Abstract

The region coverage control problem of multiple stratospheric airships system is firstly addressed in this paper. Towards it, we propose a two-layer control framework with the artificial potential field (APF)-based region coverage control law and the adaptive tracking control law. The APF-based region coverage control law ensures the coverage task is achieved until every single stratospheric airship ends up performing station keeping where near the respective global minimum point, in which an innovative solution to the local minimum problem is put forward. The adaptive tracking control law is designed to realize motion control using tracking the desired velocity and angular velocity given by coverage control law, with the consideration of several practical control problems as unknown individual differences and external disturbances. To save resources, the combined self-/event-triggered mechanism designed therein significantly reduces the times of state information transmission and control law calculation. The effectiveness of the proposed control framework is verified through simulations.