Containment control for underactuated unmanned surface vehicles formation

This paper proposes a distributed containment constraint control algorithm considering the interference of ocean waves and actuator saturation. In this paper, an improved barrier Lyapunov function is introduced at the motion layer to construct a constraint boundary, thereby constraining the containment position errors. Additionally, a fixed-time interference observer is utilized to estimate the wave interferences. Meanwhile, a virtual control law is designed to eliminate containment position errors in real-time, enhancing the anti-interference ability and navigation reliability of the multi-unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) system. Based on the proof of the convergence of the system errors, the effectiveness of the control strategy is verified through numerical simulation experiments using the simuNPS software.