Leader-Follower Formation Control of USVs With Prescribed Performance and Collision Avoidance

• Published in: IEEE transactions on industrial informatics Vol. 15; no. 1; pp. 572 - 581
• Main Authors: He, Shude, Wang, Min, Dai, Shi-Lu, Luo, Fei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.01.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Adaptive control; Collision avoidance; Collision dynamics; Computer simulation; Disturbances; Dynamical systems; formation control; Informatics; Neural networks; Nonlinear control; Nonlinear dynamics; Parameter estimation; Parameter uncertainty; prescribed performance; Steady-state; Surface vehicles; Tracking errors; Trajectory; Transient analysis; Uncertainty; unmanned surface vehicles (USVs); Unmanned vehicles; Upper bounds; Vehicle dynamics; Vehicles
• ISSN: 1551-3203; 1941-0050
• DOI: 10.1109/TII.2018.2839739

This paper addresses a decentralized leader-follower formation control problem for a group of fully actuated unmanned surface vehicles with prescribed performance and collision avoidance. The vehicles are subject to time-varying external disturbances, and the vehicle dynamics include both parametric uncertainties and uncertain nonlinear functions. The control objective is to make each vehicle follow its reference trajectory and avoid collision between each vehicle and its leader. We consider prescribed performance constraints, including transient and steady-state performance constraints, on formation tracking errors. In the kinematic design, we introduce the dynamic surface control technique to avoid the use of vehicle's acceleration. To compensate for the uncertainties and disturbances, we apply an adaptive control technique to estimate the uncertain parameters including the upper bounds of the disturbances and present neural network approximators to estimate uncertain nonlinear dynamics. Consequently, we design a decentralized adaptive formation controller that ensures uniformly ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop system with prescribed performance and avoids collision between each vehicle and its leader. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the decentralized formation controller.