Event-Triggered Cooperative Path Following of Autonomous Surface Vehicles Over Wireless Network With Experiment Results

This article addresses cooperative path-following problem of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) over a wireless network with constrained resources. A network-based resource-aware control architecture is presented to avoid unnecessary communications, computations, and actuations. Specifically, an event-triggered cooperative control law is designed to deal with the limited network bandwidth. Each ASV broadcasts its cooperation variable to its neighboring ASVs based on predefined event conditions under directed communication links. Then, an event-triggered path-following control law is proposed based on a line-of-sight approach. An event-triggered extended state observer is developed to estimate the uncertainties and external disturbances without periodic estimation. Finally, an event-triggered kinetic control law with aperiodic actuation is developed. The input-to-state stability of the closed-loop path-following system is analyzed by employing cascade theory, and Zeno behavior is excluded. A salient feature of the proposed network-based resource-aware control architecture is that cooperative path following can be achieved with low network traffic and reduced computation. Experiment results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed network-based resource-aware control architecture for multiple ASVs by using aperiodic communications, estimations, and executions.