Event-Triggered Cooperative Formation Control for Autonomous Surface Vehicles Under the Maritime Search Operation

To improve the autonomy of maritime search and rescue (SAR) operation, this paper concentrates on the formation control problem for autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) with the limited communication resource. A novel parallel search guidance, considering the maneuvering characteristics of ASVs, is developed to guide the formation to execute the automatic SAR operation. That can guarantee that the corresponding guidance law is highly efficient, self-driving and suitable for the large-scale formation. Combined with the guidance principle, a formation control algorithm is proposed by fuse of the event-triggered control and neural networks (NNs). In the proposed scheme, the gain uncertainty of actuators is effectively compensated requiring no prior information around the model structure. Unlike the existing results, the proposed event-triggered mechanism can activate synchronously both the controller and the NNs weight estimator. Considerable effort has been made to guarantee the semi-global uniform ultimate bounded (SGUUB) stability. Finally, two examples are illustrated to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.