摘要

In this paper, the distributed formation control problem for multiple autonomous surface vessels in the presence of uncertain dynamics and environment disturbances is considered based on an extended state observer (ESO). The objective is to drive the vessels to automatically track the time-varying trajectory in a desired formation under the communication protocol that only a part of vessels can obtain the information of reference trajectory, and the communication topology graph is directed. A distributed formation control algorithm based on a dynamic surface control (DSC) technique and the outputs of the ESO is proposed for the marine surface vessels. The ESO is used to estimate the velocity signals and total disturbances including uncertain dynamics and environmental disturbances. The DSC is developed to design the control law for avoiding the calculation explosion of virtual law caused by a backstepping technique. All the error signals in the closed-loop system are proved to be bound by using the Lyapunov theory. Numerical simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed formation control approach.