Dynamic surface control for path following of the USV-UAV with time-varying disturbances

This paper investigates the problem of the cooperative path following for unmanned surface vehicle (USV) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to under the time-varying disturbances. Taking the main engine speed, rudder angle and the rotor angular velocities as the control inputs, the position and attitude control laws were designed under the assumption "the actuators’ gain can be known". In the algorithm, the reference heading angles for the USV-UAV can be calculated by the virtual ship and virtual aircraft (VS-VA) guidance, and the desired roll and pitch angles for UAV can be derived via the position control law. Furthermore, the attitude control law and the position and attitude errors can be stabilized by utilizing the Backstepping method and dynamic surface control technique. Finally, the theoretical stability of the closed loop control system was proofed by the Lyapunov theorem and the well performance was obtained through numerical simulation in presence of the time-varying disturbance.