Affine Formation Maneuver Control for NUSVs: An Anti-Competing Interaction Solution With Random Packet Losses

Abstract

Network’s communication mechanism and reliability are main factors that affect the maneuverability and robustness of networked unmanned surface vehicles (NUSVs). This article investigates event-driven affine formation maneuver control (AFMC) of NUSVs. Two synchronously occurring configuration maneuvers, i.e., position formation and attitude consensus, can be achieved under the event-driven AFMC in manner of discrete neighboring communication. Nevertheless, the communication channel will be simultaneously occupied by multiple packets when different nodes trigger their events at the same time. Worse still, the broadcasted packets may lose when inter-vehicle Euclidean distances are maneuvered beyond the allowable communication range, failing to achieve the pre-specified maneuvering requirement. Regarding this, by introducing a reference system for each vehicle, a novel dynamic interleaved periodic event-triggered mechanism (DIPETM) is subsequently explored to prevent NUSVs from communication competition. Based on this framework, an inner-dynamic variable determined by the conditional-prescribed event detecting period is firstly constructed, which is not only designed to optimize the triggering frequency, but also responsible for evaluating the secondary damage caused by random packet losses. Numerical simulations are conducted to illustrate the efficacy of this work. Note to Practitioners—The swarm of NUSVs often needs to operate for extended periods in complex environments, which may challenge its maneuverability and robustness. One expectation is the ability to maneuver the entire formation in a distributed manner, performing arbitrary configuration transformation. However, limited communication resources problems are not ignorable, especially when confronting unreliable network connectivity during frequent formation maneuver processes. The reasons lie in three aspects. Firstly, physical hardware prefers the data to be detected and transmitted in manner of discrete form. Secondly, the available communication channel is always limited, leading to only a few nodes being permitted to broadcast packets at the same time. Thirdly, random packet losses phenomenon may cover the significant broadcasted packets, resulting in system instability. Within this context, we design a novel DIPETM based AFMC scheme to solve the aforementioned problems while satisfying the formation maneuver expectation.

Topics & Concepts