Platoon Formation Control With Prescribed Performance Guarantees for USVs

This paper studies the platoon formation control problem for unmanned surface vehicles, in the presence of modeling uncertainties and time-varying external disturbances. The control objective is to make the vehicular platoons proceed along a given trajectory while maintaining a desired line-of-sight (LOS) range between each vehicle and its predecessor. To provide transient performance specifications on formation errors, including LOS range and angle errors, we enforce prescribed performance guarantees in the control design. The prescribed performance guarantees mean that formation errors evolve always within the predefined regions that are bounded by exponentially decaying functions of time. Using prescribed performance control methodology, neural network approximation, disturbance observers, dynamic surface control technique, and Lyapunov synthesis, we propose an adaptive formation control that ensures internal stability of closed-loop systems with guaranteed prescribed performance. Meanwhile, both collision avoidance and connectivity maintenance between two consecutive vehicles are guaranteed during the whole operation. The proposed formation control is decentralized in the sense that the control action on each vehicle depends only on information from its immediate predecessor. Simulation results demonstrate the performance of the proposed control.