Formation tracking control for multiple surface vessels systems

In this paper, we study the formation tacking control problems for multiple vessels system by using adaptive techniques. To process the under-actuated dynamics of the vessels, we use a coordinate transformation method to transform the under-actuated system into a linear second-order system. For the transformed multiple vessels system, we design an adaptive formation tacking controller. A non-smooth function term is introduced to deal with the leader vessels’ unknown control inputs. Adaptive gain method is introduced to avoid using the global topology information. For the disturbances, we use the adaptive neural networks to estimate them and then design the compensating controller. Finally, we perform a numerical simulation experiment, and the simulation results show the effectiveness of our method.