Weight-Based Distributed Flocking Control for Multiple Electric Marine Surface Vehicles Under Fully Intermittent Communications
Cheng Zhu, Weikai Wang, Bin Zhou, Hongde Qin, Jianming Miao
Abstract
Growing demands for marine missions are driving the trend of maneuvering the large-scale fleet of electric marine surface vehicles (LSF-EMSVs) through obstacle-laden environments. Against this backdrop, this article investigates the collision-free distributed flocking control problem for LSF-EMSVs under the fully intermittent communication scenario. Existing collision-free works considering intermittent communication would like to assume that the transmission of relative position is continuous. In contrast, we discuss the case where the transmissions of all states are interrupted and use the term fully intermittent to distinguish it. To address this challenge, a weight-based adjacency matrix is developed to assess the communication connectivity and collision risk simultaneously. Accordingly, the collision avoidance analysis can be isolated from the dynamic layer, simplifying the control design. Then, a switching estimator based on intermittent relative positions is introduced for collision avoidance and communication maintaining, even on the period of communication interruption. Based on these designs, a completely distributed flocking control scheme is proposed for LSF-EMSVs, which is solely rely on the relative position and self course and velocities. Effectiveness of the proposed control schemes is demonstrated by theoretical analysis and semi-physical simulation results.