Distributed fault‐tolerant parallel formation control of underactuated marine surface vehicles with limited control input

Summary In this paper, an adaptive distributed parallel formation control approach is proposed for a group of underactuated marine surface vehicles with actuator fault and limited control input. Firstly, the algebraic topology is employed to model the intervehicle communication network of the multiple vehicles. Both the model uncertainties and environmental disturbance satisfying norm‐bounded conditions are discussed. Secondly, a concise bounded‐feedback adaptive law is developed to compensate the supremum of the neural network weight matrix, rather than each element of the matrix. That could dramatically reduce the computation burden of the algorithm and facilitate its application in practical engineering. Furthermore, a new adaptive parameter is introduced to analyze the input saturation and compensate the energy fading of actuator fault simultaneously. Finally, it is proved that all the signals of the closed‐loop system are semiglobal uniformly ultimately bounded. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the performance and superiority of the proposed control strategy in different cases.