Robust Event-Triggered Formation Control for Underactuated Ships Under the Practice Constraint*

This article mainly concentrates on the formation control issue for the under-actuated ship with the consideration of ocean practice, i.e., the waypoints-based predefined route and the restricted communication resource. With the improved logical virtual ship (LVS) guidance algorithm, the formation can sail along the smoothed waypoint-based route under the ocean environment. For merit of the event-triggered strategy, the control commands (i.e., the engine speed and the rudder angle) are updated only when necessary, and that can reduce the communication load of the communication channels between the controller and actuators. Besides, by employing the neural damping method, system uncertain terms can be remodeled and only two relevant adaptive learning parameters are required to be updated online, thus avoiding the updating of numerous neural networks weights. Finally, by the Lyapunov analysis, all tracking errors in the formation system can be guaranteed the semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB) convergence. The digital simulated experiment can verify the effectiveness and superiority of our control algorithm.