Adaptive event-triggered cooperative trajectory tracking for unmanned surface vehicles with actuator faults

Abstract

In this article, an adaptive event-triggered cooperative trajectory tracking control strategy is proposed to solve the problem of unmanned surface vehicles subjected to actuator faults and unknown disturbances. First, in order to reconstruct the state information of the virtual leader, a reference signal generator is designed for the followers, which can also accurately estimate the leader’s output information under switching topologies. Meanwhile, an event-triggering mechanism has been designed to reduce the frequency of control input updates. Subsequently, a novel robust adaptive fault-tolerant control algorithm is proposed using backstepping control theory to address actuator faults and unknown control directions. In addition, it also ensures that all signals in the closed-loop system are bounded, and the tracking error converges to zero. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified through simulation results.