Robust composite event-triggered control for heterogeneous ships: Application to an auto-detecting operation

Area of Science:

• Marine Engineering
• Control Systems Engineering
• Robotics

Background:

• Maintaining formation consistency and efficient communication are critical for autonomous maritime systems.
• Heterogeneous ship formations face challenges in coordination, especially during dynamic tasks like trespasser detection.
• Existing control algorithms often struggle with communication resource limitations and system uncertainties.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an event-triggered control algorithm for synchronized control of real and virtual ships.
• To enhance communication efficiency in ship formations.
• To address system uncertainties and quantization effects in heterogeneous ship formation control.

Main Methods:

• A composite event-triggered control algorithm utilizing a hysteresis quantizer.
• An improved L2 virtual ship (L2-VS) guidance method integrating leader-following and artificial potential field (APF) principles.
• Neural network approximation for system model uncertainties and adaptive compensation for quantization and parametric uncertainties.
• Lyapunov stability analysis to guarantee system boundedness.

Main Results:

• Effective control of position and speed consistency between real and virtual ships.
• Significant reduction in communication resource occupation.
• Successful guidance for heterogeneous ship formations in time-varying formations for trespass detection.
• Demonstrated robustness against system model uncertainties and quantization effects.

Conclusions:

• The proposed event-triggered control algorithm effectively synchronizes real and virtual ships while optimizing communication resources.
• The L2-VS guidance method combined with neural networks and adaptive compensation provides a robust solution for complex maritime formation control tasks.
• The algorithm is validated for maritime security applications, proving its practical effectiveness in detection and reformation scenarios.