Adaptive neural control for cooperative path following of marine surface vehicles: state and output feedback

Abstract

This paper addresses the cooperative path-following problem of multiple marine surface vehicles subject to dynamical uncertainties and ocean disturbances induced by unknown wind, wave and ocean current. The control design falls neatly into two parts. One is to steer individual marine surface vehicle to track a predefined path and the other is to synchronise the along-path speed and path variables under the constraints of an underlying communication network. Within these two formulations, a robust adaptive path-following controller is first designed for individual vehicles based on backstepping and neural network techniques. Then, a decentralised synchronisation control law is derived by means of consensus on along-path speed and path variables based on graph theory. The distinct feature of this design lies in that synchronised path following can be reached for any undirected connected communication graphs without accurate knowledge of the model. This result is further extended to the output feedback case, where an observer-based cooperative path-following controller is developed without measuring the velocity of each vehicle. For both designs, rigorous theoretical analysis demonstrate that all signals in the closed-loop system are semi-global uniformly ultimately bounded. Simulation results validate the performance and robustness improvement of the proposed strategy.

Fuzzy observer‐based tracking control of an underactuated underwater vehicle with linear velocity estimation

“…This section contributes to developing a trajectory tracking controller of an underactuated vehicle without measuring the linear velocity. Inspired by [34,35], an observer based on available states is proposed to estimate the unknown linear velocity. And a fuzzybased tracking controller is designed by using backstepping technique and Lyapunov theory.…”

“…It is worth noting that not all the state variables are available in practice due to technical reasons, saving of implementation cost [34], or communication limitation [35]. In [36], the authors developed a sliding mode controller for an underwater robot based on multiple-input and multiple-output extended-state-observer.…”

Neural observer-based path following control for underactuated unmanned surface vessels with input saturation and time-varying disturbance

“…5,[11][12][13][14][15] In Zhang et al, 13 a robust radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) waypoint-based path following control strategy was proposed for marine ships in the presence of multiobstacles. In Wang et al, 14 an adaptive RBFNN controller was designed for cooperative path following of multiple marine surface vehicles (MSVs) subject to dynamical uncertainties. In Park et al, 15 RBFNN-based output feedback control law was developed for trajectory tracking of underactuated surface vessels.…”

Experimental Verification of a Coordinated Path-Following Strategy for Underactuated Marine Vehicles

“…However, the coordination dynamics are not analyzed in this work. Recent works considering coordinated path following are Wang et al ( 2016 ) and Liu et al ( 2016 ). In, Wang et al ( 2016 ), coordinated path following is investigated theoretically for vehicles on curved paths with disturbances at a dynamic level.…”