Formation-containment control of multiple underactuated surface vessels with sampling communication via hierarchical sliding mode approach

The formation-containment control problem of multiple underactuated surface vessels (USVs) is investigated in this paper. A hierarchical sliding mode control strategy is proposed to solve this problem under sampling communication. The proposed control comprises two layers: a local sliding model control layer and a distributed coordination layer. The local control layer is designed to drive each USV tracking the reference trajectories, and the distributed coordination layer is proposed to generate the reference trajectories satisfying the control objective of formation-containment control. To achieve the formation-containment control of the closed-loop multiple USVs, a sufficient condition is obtained by utilizing the Lyapunov stability and eigenvalue analysis. Finally, a simulation result is provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical sliding mode approach. (C) 2019 ISA. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the formation-containment control problem of multiple underactuated surface vessels (USVs) and proposes a hierarchical sliding mode control strategy. The strategy comprises two layers, namely a local sliding model control layer and a distributed coordination layer, and a sufficient condition is obtained using Lyapunov stability and eigenvalue analysis to achieve the formation-containment control of the closed-loop multiple USVs.