Human-in-the-Loop Time-Varying Formation Control for NMSVs With Communication Links Faults: A Prescribed-Time Fuzzy Controller

The existing formation control strategies are difficult to respond quickly to the complex and ever-changing marine environment. Thus, an efficient and reliable strategy is urgently needed to meet the requirements of networked marine surface vehicles' (NMSVs) formation control under this background. This paper investigates the time-varying formation control (TVFC) problem of NMSVs subject to communication links faults and model uncertainty. A hierarchical control framework is constructed for developing the prescribed-time fuzzy control (PTFC) algorithm for NMSVs, comprising a distributed formation tracking (DFT) layer and local fuzzy control (LFC) layer. The DFT layer is responsible for ensuring that all marine surface vehicle followers estimate the expected states of the virtual leader based on human-in-the-loop (HiTL) strategy. The HiTL strategy is introduced to promptly respond to unexpected emergencies in complex marine environments. Specifically, the artificially arranged control inputs are transmitted to manipulate the virtual leader through the employment of gesture-to-formation system and further guide the navigation of NMSVs followers synchronously. The LFC layer is conducted to achieve the TVFC and cope with the model uncertainty of NMSVs by using the sliding surface and fuzzy logic system. And the tracking errors of both two layers can converge to the origin within the prescribed time. Besides, the sufficient conditions of uniform convergence and stability for the closed-loop system are derived based on the Lyapunov stability. Finally, several simulation and comparative experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed theoretical results.