Adaptive bipartite tracking control for multiple autonomous surface vessels

This paper is concerned with bipartite tracking control design for multiple autonomous surface vessels with unknown dynamics and external disturbances. Under a signed directed graph, novel distributed adaptive control inputs are constructed recursively by using backstepping method to make the bipartite tracking errors eventually converge to an arbitrarily small compact set by appropriately adjusting design parameters. To reduce the complexity of the controllers, we employ parameter separation technique to deal with the unknown dynamics. In particular, under the assumption that the reference trajectory is only available to a fraction of followers, the cooperative tracking is also achieved with the proposed distributed control design scheme. Finally, two simulation examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of theoretical results. •The paper solves bipartite tracking problem of MASVs with nonlinear uncertainties.•Novel control scheme is derived recursively with backstepping method.•The adaptive control input for each follower can be implemented distributedly.