Formation Control of Unmanned Vessels with Saturation Constraint and Extended State Observation

This paper addressed the formation control problem of surface unmanned vessels with model uncertainty, parameter perturbation, and unknown environmental disturbances. A formation control method based on the control force saturation constraint and the extended state observer (ESO) was proposed. Compared with the control methods which only consider the disturbances from external environment, the method proposed in this paper took model uncertainties, parameter perturbation, and external environment disturbances as the compound disturbances, and the ESO was used to estimate and compensate for the disturbances, which improved the anti-disturbance performance of the controller. The formation controller was designed with the virtual leader strategy, and backstepping technique was designed with saturation constraint (SC) function to avoid the lack of force of the actuator. The stability of the closed-loop system was analyzed with the Lyapunov method, and it was proved that the whole system is uniformly and ultimately bounded. The tracking error can converge to arbitrarily small by choosing reasonable controller parameters. The comparison and analysis of simulation experiments showed that the controller designed in this paper had strong anti-disturbance and anti-saturation performance to the compound disturbances of vessels and can effectively complete the formation control.