Distributed prescribed performance containment control for unmanned surface vehicles based on disturbance observer

This paper introduces a distributed containment control strategy for multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) under the unknown external disturbances. The communication network of the USVs is a fixed, directed topology and only a part of the follower USVs can read the states of leader USVs. To guarantee the transient and steady-state performance of the system, the tracking errors are converted into new error functions. By utilizing the disturbance observer, the external disturbances are effectively estimated. According to the new group of errors, a distributed containment controller is proposed with the estimated external disturbances. Furthermore, using graph theory and Lyapunov approach, it is proved that all variables of the multiple USV systems are bounded and the tracking errors can be confined within the specified performance ranges. Finally, simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the designed distributed containment controller.