A Novel Cooperative Design for USV–UAV Systems: 3-D Mapping Guidance and Adaptive Fuzzy Control

This work investigates a novel cooperative design for path following of the mixed-order underactuated surface vehicle (USV) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the presence of the structure uncertainties and external disturbances. The designed cooperative scheme is comprised of the 3-D mapping guidance and adaptive fuzzy control algorithm. The 3-D mapping guidance is developed to provide the reference signals of the yaw degree of freedom for the USV and UAV by utilizing the equivalent mapping technique. To control the USV–UAV converge to the desired path, the adaptive fuzzy control algorithm is designed for the position and attitude loops by fusing the dynamic surface control (DSC) and the backstepping techniques. The position loop can generate the thrust inputs for the USV–UAV and provide the desired rolling and pitching angles for the UAV by using the nonlinear decoupling method. In the proposed algorithm, the model uncertainties are approximated by the fuzzy logic system and only eight norm-based adaptive parameters are required to be updated online. Based on the Lyapunov theorem, the stability of the position loop and the attitude loop for the USV–UAV systems is achieved and all signals in the cooperative systems are the semiglobal uniform ultimate bounded (SGUUB). The superiorities and the effectiveness of the proposed strategy are verified through the numerical experiment on the MATLAB platform under the external disturbances.