Leader-follower Formation Control of Unmanned Surface Vehicles Using Non-singular Terminal Sliding Mode Strategy

In this paper, a leader-follower formation control strategy based on non-singular terminal sliding mode control under complex unknown disturbances is proposed. The contributions of this paper are: (1) An unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) formation control strategy is proposed based on fixed-time non-singular terminal sliding mode, which greatly improves the convergence rate of the formation system; (2) A finite-time extended state observer is designed to handle external disturbances, which greatly improves the formation performance of the system; (3) Stability of the closed-loop control system is proved by Lyapunov stability analysis. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control strategy is highly efficient and effective.