Robust control for cooperative path following of marine surface-air vehicles with a constrained inter-vehicles communication

This paper investigates a cooperative problem for multiple unmanned surface vessels and multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (USVs-UAVs) for executing a path following operation that has a potential in aspects of the lower design complexity and constrained inter-vehicles communication. The proposed scheme is formed of three parts as below: planning, guidance and control design. The cooperative problem for USVs-UAVs is addressed in planning term that uses an improved leader–follower structure with the initial position and virtual velocity independence, and introduces an event-triggered communication for tackling the fact that the communication bandwidth is constrained in the engineering practice. The guidance principle is developed for providing a control reference which should be tracked by the actual vehicles, actuated by the proposed control algorithm. In that, the key feature is that a robust bounded compensating technique is presented to addressing the nonlinear terms, an important issue in the control networks. This leads to a lower design complexity in comparison of existing techniques. The stability of the proposed algorithm is proved that uses the Lyapunov theorem. Finally, the numerical examples are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.