Cooperative Path Following Control of USV-UAVs Considering Low Design Complexity and Command Transmission Requirements

This article investigates a robust cooperative path following control algorithm for an unmanned surface vessel and unmanned aerial vehicles (USV-UAVs) that releases the design complexity and command transmission requirements for the potential significance to implement a maritime square search mission. The latter is a classical search pattern suggested by the international aeronautical and maritime search and rescue (IAMSAR) manual. To program the reference signals for the USV-UAVs simultaneously, the reference routes are programmed that uses a virtual ship and a virtual aerial. Therein, the information of the virtual aerials can be mapped from a virtual ship. Further, the desired attitude angles are derived under the cooperative virtual guidance framework. For a control part, a novel threshold rule of the dynamic event-triggered mechanism is reconstructed according to output errors to avoid the artificial parameter tuning and reduce the data transmission load from the controllers to the actuators. Besides, a L-function is designed to eliminate an effect caused by the model nonlinearities and disturbances. This ensures a lower design complexity of the control system. The stability of the proposed control algorithm is proved via the Lyapunov theorem. Finally, the effectiveness and the reasonable are evaluated on the simulation platform.