This paper presents a new cooperative control strategy for dynamic positioning of multiple surface vesselssubject to unknown time-varying environmental disturbances and input saturation. The vessels are assumedinterconnected through a directed topology rather than bidirectional. Two control objectives are considered in thispaper. The first one is to make these vessels track desired positions and headings, and the other control objective isto hold the desired formation. For these purposes, we propose a cooperative control which consists of finite-timedisturbance observer, auxiliary dynamic system and dynamic surface control technique. A nonlinear finite-timeobserver is developed to estimate unknown time-varying disturbance. To tackle the input saturation problem, anauxiliary dynamic system is constructed. It is also proved that all signals in the closed-loop control system convergeto a small neighborhood of equilibrium state via Lyapunov analysis. Simulation results are given to validate theeffectiveness of the proposed control strategy.
This paper presents a new cooperative control strategy for dynamic positioning of multiple surface vesselssubject to unknown time-varying environmental disturbances and input saturation. The vessels are assumedinterconnected through a directed topology rather than bidirectional. Two control objectives are considered in thispaper. The first one is to make these vessels track desired positions and headings, and the other control objective isto hold the desired formation. For these purposes, we propose a cooperative control which consists of finite-timedisturbance observer, auxiliary dynamic system and dynamic surface control technique. A nonlinear finite-timeobserver is developed to estimate unknown time-varying disturbance. To tackle the input saturation problem, anauxiliary dynamic system is constructed. It is also proved that all signals in the closed-loop control system convergeto a small neighborhood of equilibrium state via Lyapunov analysis. Simulation results are given to validate theeffectiveness of the proposed control strategy.