An Anti-Congestion Interaction Mechanism Based Leaderless Formation Control for Unmanned Surface Vehicles With Communication Interruptions

Abstract

More credible communication reliability and more economical resource consumption are technological trends for multiple leaderless unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), while the realistic marine environment severely threatens system communication quality. Within this context, this paper investigates the leaderless formation control problem of USVs experiencing inter-vehicle communication interruptions. Concretely, by establishing the formation error system, the concerned leaderless formation control problem is tactfully transformed into the formation error consensus problem. Taking communication interruptions into account, a distributed controller is developed to achieve formation error consensus with intermittent inter-vehicle communications. Simultaneously, to endow the leaderless formation system with high economy, a novel intermittent dynamic interleaved periodic event-triggered mechanism (IDIPETM) is integrated into the controller synthesis, leaving the USVs to interact with each other only at preset periodic event-detecting instants. By assigning exclusive interleave bias to each vehicle, the proposed IDIPETM naturally eliminates the possibility that multiple USVs simultaneously broadcast information, thereby eradicating the communication congestion phenomenon inherent in the existing periodic event-triggered mechanisms. Finally, the theoretical analysis and simulation results are provided to evaluate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control scheme.