Predictive Control-Based Consensus of Networked Unmanned Surface Vehicle Formation Systems

This paper studies the consensus problem of network-based unmanned surface vehicle formation (USVF) systems. According to the Nomoto model, a novel discrete-time dynamic model for USVF systems is established. Based on the established dynamic model, an observer and a predictive controller considering the effects of network-induced delays and packet dropouts are constructed. An improved predictive control scheme is presented such that the state of every unmanned surface vehicle (USV) in the formation asymptotically reaches consensus. The performance analysis verifies the effectiveness of the proposed predictive control scheme for network-based USVF systems.