Experience-based event-triggered path-following control for marine surface-air vehicles via a coordinated time-synchronous guidance

This paper investigates the cooperative control strategy for marine surface-air vehicles systems composed by an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) when facing the execution of island scanning mission. The proposed scheme consists of the coordinated time-synchronous guidance and experience based event-triggered control algorithm. To optimize the performance for executing island scanning missions, the coordinated time-synchronous guidance law is developed with considering the different maneuvering characteristics of the cooperative system. The proposed guidance law guarantees time synchronization while leveraging the advantages of high maneuverability of UAVs. Specifically, an experience based event-triggered mechanism with the adjustable threshold is designed to reduce the transmission frequency of control commands. The triggering threshold is specially designed based on an experience based mechanism to maintain satisfactory control performance. The stability of the USV-UAV system is proved via Lyapunov theorem and all signals in the cooperative system are the semi-global uniform ultimate bounded (SGUUB). Finally, two simulations are provided to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.