A Cross-coupling Control Approach for Coordinated Formation of Surface Vessels with Uncertain Disturbances

In this paper, a cross-coupling control approach for the coordinated formation of multiple marine surface vessels with direct communication topology in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances is presented. To synchronize the vessels' relative position errors while tracking their assigned trajectories, a cross-coupling formation controller is designed, in which a sliding mode surface in terms of the velocity tracking error and position cross-coupling error is introduced. Then, an adaptive radial basis function neural network is incorporated into the controller to learn the upper bound of model uncertainties and external disturbances. Utilizing Barbalat's lemma and topology theory, all of the error signals in the closed-loop system are proved to converge to zero asymptotically. Finally, numerical simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed coordinated formation control strategy.