Path Following with Disturbance Rejection for Inhomogeneous Formations with Underactuated Agents

摘要

This paper considers straight-line path following forinhomogeneous formations with underactuated agents. The formationcan be comprised of agents with different dynamics that are eachaffected by a different unknown environmental disturbance. Formationpath following is achieved using a twofold strategy consisting ofa guidance law to steer each vessel to a predefined path and adecentralised nonlinear formation control law utilising local informationonly to synchronise the agents position along the path such that adesired formation is achieved. The resulting closed-loop error dynamicsconsisting of the path-following error dynamics and formation errordynamics is analysed using theory for feedback-interconnected systems.The origin of the closed-loop error dynamics is shown to be uniformlyglobally asymptotically stable. The control strategy is validated withsimulation results in a case study.