Leader-follower formation control of underactuated surface vehicles based on sliding mode control and parameter estimation

Abstract This paper studies the leader-follower formation control of underactuated surface vehicles with model uncertainties and environmental disturbances. A parameter estimation and upper bound estimation based sliding mode control scheme is proposed to solve the problem of the unknown plant parameters and environmental disturbances. For each of these leader-follower formation systems, the dynamic equations of position and attitude are analyzed using coordinate transformation with the aid of the backstepping technique. All the variables are guaranteed to be uniformly ultimately bounded stable in the closed-loop system, which is proven by the distribution design Lyapunov function synthesis. The main advantages of this approach are that: first, parameter estimation based sliding mode control can enhance the robustness of the closed-loop system in presence of model uncertainties and environmental disturbances; second, a continuous function is developed to replace the signum function in the design of sliding mode scheme, which devotes to reduce the chattering of the control system. Finally, numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.