Distributed containment control for unmanned surface vehicles by performance adjustable event-triggered strategy

This paper studies event-triggered containment control problems for multiple unmanned surface vehicle (USV) systems with positive minimum inter-event time (MIET) guarantees. In the framework of this paper, control information is transmitted to the actuator only when the event is triggered. Moreover, the maximum frequency of transmission of control information can be adjusted by the designer. To implement it, an event-triggering mechanism was created to manage the transfer of control information. And by introducing an auxiliary system the positive MIET was strictly limited. Compared with the existing event-triggering mechanism, the proposed mechanism can accurately compute and adjust the MIET to meet the bandwidth requirements of the communication. For the containment control problem, a model-parameter-free control strategy is used in the controller design process to counteract the unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances of the multiple USV systems. Later, a distributed containment controller is designed by combining it with sliding mode control (SMC) technology, which does not require model parameter information. Finally, the effectiveness of the performance adjustable event-triggered strategy is verified by theoretical analysis and numerical simulation.