Distributed event-triggered affine formation control for multiple underactuated marine surface vehicles

This article focuses on the distributed event-triggered affine formation control problem for multiple under-actuated marine surface vehicles (UMSVs) considering affine transformation and communication energy con-sumption under a directed interaction topology. Firstly, the affine transformation mechanism is adopted to improve the flexibility and maneuverability of the formation. The proposed technique allows a rich collection of collective motions such as translation, rotation, scaling, and the combination of these transformations. Then, unlike the event-triggered control of a single marine vehicle, this paper considers reducing communication frequency between vehicles. Thus, an event-triggered mechanism is proposed, which can save computation re-sources compared with traditional ones while excluding the Zeno behavior. Subsequently, it is proved that all signals in the closed-loop system are ultimately uniformly bounded (UUB), meanwhile, all tracking errors converge to a small compact set under the proposed control strategy. Finally, numerical simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed formation controller.