Containment control for a group of underactuated marine surface vehicles

This paper addresses the problem of robust containment control of multiple underactuated marine surface vehicles (UMSVs) in the presence of nonlinear uncertainties. The solution to this problem has been solved in two steps. In the first step, a virtual control law is presented to drive all the followers of the group into the convex hull spanned by the leaders; Then, in the second step, a robust controller is developed through utilizing sliding mode control (SMC). With the aid of dynamic surface control (DSC) technique, the proposed scheme is able to overcome the explosion of complexity inherent in design process. Based on Lyapunov stability theory, it is proved that all signals in the closed-loop systems are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB), and the containment errors converge to a small neighborhood of the origin. Finally, three simulation examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the control method.