Distributed finite-time adaptive fault-tolerant formation–containment control for USVs with dynamic event-triggered mechanism

This paper presents a distributed finite-time adaptive fault-tolerant formation–containment control strategy for unmanned surface vessels (USVs) with dynamic event-triggered mechanism in the presence of total disturbances and actuator failures. A two-layer framework consisting of reference trajectory estimators and trajectory tracking controllers is proposed. In the first layer, two sets of distributed finite-time reference trajectory estimators (DFRTE) are developed using graph theory to estimate trajectory information (position and velocity) for leaders and followers. In the second layer, the fast integral terminal sliding mode control (FITSMC) is introduced to ensure that the leaders form the desired formation, and the followers converge to the convex hull formed by the leader, the robust exact differentiators (RED)-based disturbance observers are constructed to estimate the total disturbances composed of model uncertainties and external disturbances, and adaptive laws are designed to compensate actuator failures. To reduce communication resource consumption between the actuator and the controller channels, dynamic event-triggered mechanisms (DETMs) are designed to update the actuators only when the triggering conditions are satisfied. The Lyapunov analysis method is employed to prove the finite-time stability of the closed-loop system. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.