Guaranteed Performance Design for Formation Tracking and Collision Avoidance of Multiple USVs With Disturbances and Unmodeled Dynamics

Searching and containing dynamic target like oil spillage in the ocean is a challenging task due to the natural time variance of the spread of the oil. The use of cooperative multi-marine vehicle systems in a cluttered environment for this purpose poses difficulties in sustaining formation pattern to pursue and contain the leakage. In this article, in order to provide realistic setup for the industrial applications of multi-marine vehicles systems, we present a novel approach for collision-free distributed formation control for a network of underactuated surface vessels (USVs). The proposed approach comprises two layers: A distributed coordination layer and a local fixed-time neural network control layer. In the first layer, formation leaders accomplish a specified formation configuration while tracking a desired trajectory from a tracking leader. The second control layer is to robustly drive the real USVs with parametric and nonparametric uncertainties to track their corresponding formation leaders. Because only parts of the formation leaders can acquire the states of the tracking leader, a distributed fixed-time estimator is proposed to obtain accurate estimations of the desired information for each USV in the network. Next, in order to effectively maneuver in cluttered environment, local path replanning-based repulsive potential function technique is proposed for each USV in the group formation to act on the formation leaders trajectories. Further, redesigned adaptive neural networks are integrated to compensate the model uncertainties. The stability of the proposed controller is verified by the Lyapunov direct method. Simulation studies of a hexagon formation are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.