Transient-Reinforced Tunnel Coordinated Control of Underactuated Marine Surface Vehicles With Actuator Faults

This paper is concerned with a performance-prescribed coordinated control problem of multiple underactuated marine surface vehicles (MSVs) subject to internal uncertainties, external disturbances, and actuator faults. An echo state network-based (ESN-based) transient-reinforced tunnel coordinated control method is proposed for underactuated MSVs with prescribed performance metrics. Specifically, a graph-based trajectory generator is designed to generate reference signals for various application scenarios. In the guidance loop, a tunnel prescribed performance (TPP) is established to characterize the position and heading coordination metrics of underactuated MSVs. With the TPP-based equivalent transformation, the tunnel guidance laws are devised by an underactuation guidance principle. In the control loop, an ESN-based neural estimator is constructed to identify unknown kinetics consisting of internal uncertainties, external disturbances, and actuator faults. Utilizing the estimated information, the ESN-based surge and yaw control laws are presented. The proposed closed-loop system is proven to be input-to-state stable via the theoretical analysis, and position and heading tracking errors can evolve within TPP constraints regardless of actuator faults. Finally, comparison simulation results are employed to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.