Cooperative Target Tracking of Multiple Autonomous Surface Vehicles Under Switching Interaction Topologies

This paper is concerned with the cooperative target tracking of multiple autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) under switching interaction topologies. For the target to be tracked, only its position can be measured/received by some of the ASVs, and its velocity is unavailable to all the ASVs. A distributed extended state observer taking into consideration switching topologies is designed to integrally estimate unknown target dynamics and neighboring ASVs' dynamics. Accordingly, a novel kinematic controller is designed, which takes full advantage of known information and avoids the approximation of some virtual control vectors. Moreover, a disturbance observer is presented to estimate unknown time-varying environmental disturbance. Furthermore, a distributed dynamic controller is designed to regulate the involved ASVs to cooperatively track the target. It enables each ASV to adjust its forces and moments according to the received information from its neighbors. The effectiveness of the derived results is demonstrated through cooperative target tracking performance analysis for a tracking system composed of five interacting ASVs.