Adaptive dynamic surface control for cooperative path following of multiple autonomous surface vessels

This paper addresses the cooperative path following problem of multiple autonomous surface vessels with model uncertainty and unknown disturbances induced by wind,waves and ocean currents.A cooperative path following algorithm is proposed based on the neural network adaptive dynamic surface control technique.The single hidden layer(SHL) neural network is employed to approximate the model uncertainty and ocean disturbances;the dynamic surface control technique is introduced to dramatically lower the complexity of this algorithm;and the decentralized cooperative control law is adopted to reduce the amount of communications.The Lyapunov stability analysis shows that all closedloop signals are uniformly ultimately bounded,and a small tracking error is achieved by appropriately choosing design parameters.Comparative studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.