Distributed Adaptive Formation Control of MSVs With Prescribed Performance Under Undirected Graph

This paper presents distributed formation control with guaranteed prescribed performances for multiple parametric uncertain marine surface vehicles (MSVs) subject to external time-varying disturbances, under an undirected graph. To provide the transient and steady-state performances of neighborhood errors, the prescribed performance constraints are imposed on the neighborhood errors and these prescribed performance constraints are guaranteed by the prescribed performance control methodology. The uncertain parameters and the upper bounds of the external disturbances are estimated by a distributed parameter estimate method, in which the additive terms consisting of parameter estimates from the neighbors are added to adaptive laws to improve the consensus speed of adaptive parameters. Based on dynamic surface control (DSC) technique, prescribed performance control methodology, and Lyapunov synthesis, distributed adaptive formation controllers are designed to force the following vehicles to perform desired formation pattern with guaranteed prescribed performances. The proposed controllers are distributed in the sense that each vehicle calculates its control signals based on local information from its neighborhood set, and the utilization of DSC technique could avoid using the neighbors' accelerations in the distributed formation controllers. An illustrated example is given to show the performances of the distributed formation controllers.