Fully distributed formation-containment control for multiple unmanned surface vehicles with intermittent dynamic event-triggered protocols

Abstract

This paper investigates the layered formation-containment control problem for multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) with intermittent dynamic event-triggered protocols. Initially, the formation tracking controllers are designed for leaders to form the desired formation configuration along the reference trajectory in the first layer. In the proposed controllers, the intermittent framework is introduced to guarantee the stability of systems subject to inevitable factors including cyber-attacks or equipment constraints. Moreover, under the above intermittent framework, the dynamic event-triggered mechanism (DETM) is adopted to reduce the update frequency of control signals with positive minimum inter-event time (MIET) guarantees. Then, the containment controllers are developed for followers to converge to the convex hull spanned by leaders in the second layer. Besides, to remove the controllers’ dependency on global information, fully distributed thought is adopted in both layers. Finally, the theoretical analysis and simulation results are provided to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.