When the actuator faults and the control directions are unknown, the difficulty of the asymptotically tracking control of the surface vessel will increase. In this paper, for actuator failures and unknown control directions, a distributed adaptive asymptotically synchronous tracking control law for multiple uncertain underactuated surface vessels (USVs) is proposed, which can achieve network connectivity and good tracking performance in a limited communication range. First, a distributed nonlinear error surface is introduced to achieve synchronous tracking between USVs and maintain the initial connectivity patterns. Second, a conditional inequality is proposed to solve the problems of unknown actuator failures and unknown control directions. Then, combined with the derived technical lemmas and Barbalat’s lemma, the stability of the closed loop system is proved by the Lyapunov method. Finally, a simulation example verifies the theoretical results.
When the actuator faults and the control directions are unknown, the difficulty of the asymptotically tracking control of the surface vessel will increase. In this paper, for actuator failures and unknown control directions, a distributed adaptive asymptotically synchronous tracking control law for multiple uncertain underactuated surface vessels (USVs) is proposed, which can achieve network connectivity and good tracking performance in a limited communication range. First, a distributed nonlinear error surface is introduced to achieve synchronous tracking between USVs and maintain the initial connectivity patterns. Second, a conditional inequality is proposed to solve the problems of unknown actuator failures and unknown control directions. Then, combined with the derived technical lemmas and Barbalat’s lemma, the stability of the closed loop system is proved by the Lyapunov method. Finally, a simulation example verifies the theoretical results.