Quantized Communications in Containment Maneuvering for Output Constrained Marine Surface Vehicles: Theory and Experiment

The aim of this article is to derive a containment maneuvering coordination strategy for a team of marine surface vehicles (MSVs) to track one parameterized path guided by two virtual leaders, where the tracking errors are constrained and the communications among MSVs are quantized. A two-level coordinated framework for containment maneuvering is proposed. For the kinematic level, to obtain the performance of tracking error constraints, guidance laws are derived by developing parameterized line-of-sight-based symmetrical
$\text{{ln}}$
-type Lyapunov functions, where the control functions are injected into the guidance laws to prevent constraint violations. For the coordination level, a communication protocol is proposed to reduce the amount of communication data by developing a quantized control strategy. Compared with the current containment maneuvering strategy, the whole design can bind the along-track and cross-track errors into the user-defined regions, increase the convergence speed of tracking errors, save bandwidth of the whole network, and reduce the sensitivity of the initial positions of MSVs. Theoretical analysis shows that all signals are bounded. Experimental examples are also provided to verify the proposed containment maneuvering strategy.