Prescribed Performance and Safety-Driven Bipartite Formation Containment Control for Marine Aerial–Surface Heterogeneous Systems

This article tackles the bipartite safety-driven formation containment (BSFC) control problem for marine aerial–surface heterogeneous systems, involving uncrewed aerial vehicles and uncrewed surface vehicles. A neural network modified extended state observer is constructed to recover unavailable velocities and compensate for unknown dynamics, including actuator bias faults, approximation error, environmental disturbances, and matched/mismatched heterogeneous nonlinearities induced by model uncertainties or unknown cross-domain environmental factors. Based on this, an adaptive distributed velocity-free controller with prescribe performance constraint is proposed via the finite time command filtered backstepping design technology. In addition, the error compensation mechanism is constructed to further improve the control quality. Moreover, the integrated BSFC control and estimation performance are analyzed using the Lyapunov theory. It ensures that the errors meet the prescribed performance criteria and are uniformly ultimately bounded, with bounds that can be arbitrarily small through the selection of suitable parameters. Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the integrated design strategy.