Output-Feedback Flexible Performance-Based Safe Formation for Underactuated Unmanned Surface Vehicles

This article studies a cooperative time-varying formation of underactuated unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) with position-heading measurements, following the philosophies of (i) balance operation between performance constraints and safety requirements including collision avoidance and connectivity maintenance, and (ii) concise finite-time control design based on the integrated finite-time extended state observer (IFTESO) to facilitate the practical implementation. At first, to accomplish the guidance design of networked vehicles in the complex ocean environment and guarantee the performance of cooperative tracking errors, a flexible performance-based control scheme is investigated by feeding the potential effects of safety requirements into the modification signals of the user-specified performance functions. Then, without the application of cumbersome nonlinear tracking differentiators and backstepping techniques, an output-feedback IFTESO-based method provides a concise solution with a convenient design by taking advantage of homogeneous system theories, which further reduces the traditional computation consumption. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is validated by numerical simulations.