Separation and Rendezvous Control With Batteries Replacement for the UAV-USV Ecosystem: A Finite-Time Bipartite Method Under the MPC Structure

In most of the recent literature about model predictive control (MPC) on vehicles, the finite-time and bipartite control are rarely considered. Although existing MPC methods can be applied to address the separation and rendezvous problem, they may suffer from time wasting and consistency conflicts. The finite-time control facilitates the motion planning by pre-calculating the coverage time horizon, which can avoid the unnecessary time-wasting. The bipartite control can realize the collision avoidance for the multi-vehicle system unless the reference state is zero. Therefore, a finite-time bipartite (FTB) control method for the UAV-USV system based on MPC is proposed. However, in most of the existing UAV-USV systems, the sustainable operating mechanism is not considered as usual. In this paper, to realize the sustainable operating mechanism, an UAV-USV ecosystem is introduced and further improved. Specifically, a battery replacement process is proposed and realized by the MPC method with switching topologies. Considering an UAV-USV system, the UAVs on the USV can help the USV replace the rechargeable batteries. And this process can be realized automatically by the proposed MPC method with switching topologies in a finite time. The recursive feasibility and asymptotic stability of the proposed method are proven. In addition, a series of simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.