Uncertainty and disturbance estimator-based distributed synchronization control for multiple marine surface vehicles with prescribed performance

The accuracy is of great significance to the synchronization motion of the marine surface vehicles (MSVs). However, the accuracy is highly affected by the uncertain hydrodynamic damping dynamics and the unknown environmental disturbances. This paper aims to address the coordinated synchronization motion control problem for a group of uncertain MSVs subject to exogenous time-varying disturbances under prescribed performance constraints. To improve the accuracy of synchronization motion, the uncertainty and distur-bance estimator (UDE) is employed to completely compensate for the modeling uncertainties, the external time-varying disturbances, and the accelerations of the neighboring MSVs. Based on error transformation, backstepping procedure, and control Lyapunov synthesis, a distributed UDE-based synchronization control protocol is developed. The proposed UDE-based synchronization control algorithm could achieve fast and accurate synchronization motion in the sense that the neighborhood error converges asymptotically to zero with convergence rate no less than a given value. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed synchronization control algorithm.