Purpose Despite recent progress in target tracking control of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), achieving fast and effective tracking performance still faces challenges. To address this issue, this paper aims to design a distributed finite-time (FT) cooperative control method, which enables multiple USVs to track a target in FT with external disturbances. Design/methodology/approach By incorporating the position difference between the USV and the target as the system state in the USV model, an error system can be formed. Cooperative target tracking control can be achieved by driving these system states to zero. First, a Lyapunov function is constructed for each USV under the directed communication topology. Using the proposed controller, it is proven that all system states converge to zero in FT. Then, an event-triggered mechanism (ETM) with the control error term is incorporated, which reduces computing burden while maintaining the expected control performance. Finally, theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed event-triggered FT cooperative tracking controller can effectively achieve the purpose of this paper. Findings In the presence of nonlinear time-varying external disturbances, USVs are able to track the target in FT. Furthermore, the ETM effectively prevents Zeno behavior, demonstrating that the presented method can be applied to actual physical systems. Originality/value The proposed method, which ensures FT stability while guaranteeing Zeno-free, can be applied not only to USVs, but also to the control problems of other multi-agent systems, such as multiple unmanned aerial vehicles and multiple unmanned ground vehicles.
Liu et al. (Sat,) studied this question.