Event-Triggered Practical Formation Control of Leaderless Unmanned Surface Vehicles With Environmental Disturbances

This brief designs the practical formation for leaderless unmanned surface vehicles with environmental disturbances. An undirected graph abstracts the communication network. By virtue of event-triggered mechanism, a novel control protocol is constructed to reduce control updates and save energy resources, whose feasibility is guaranteed by excluding the Zeno behavior. Based on algebraic graph theory and orthogonal decomposition method, the concerned formation problem is tackled by performing input-to-state stability analysis onto certain resultant subsystem such that formation errors are ultimately restricted within a bounded neighborhood of origin. The holistic formation movement is described by the explicitly characterized formation reference function. A numerical simulation is conducted to verify the derived results.