Distributed Formation Control for Underactuated, Unmanned Surface Vehicles with Uncertainties and Disturbances

This paper investigates the distributed formation control problem of underactuated unmanned surface vehicles (UUSVs) with uncertainties and disturbances and proposes a novel distributed formation controller. The proposed controller redefines the dynamic and kinematic models for each UUSV, which reduces the complexity of the underactuated controller design. Dynamic surface control (DSC) is employed to eliminate the repeated derivatives of the virtual control law, which is crucial for the generation of real-time control signals. The proposed controller integrates neural network approximation with MLP-based adaptive laws to enhance the model’s resistance to disturbances. Then, an auxiliary adaptive law is designed for each UUSV to obtain a continuous controller under the compensation of approximate errors and disturbances. The results demonstrate that the controller achieves the desired goals for the formation control, and all control signals are guaranteed to be semi-global uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB). The final simulation results thoroughly prove the effectiveness of the theoretical results.