Adaptive Synchronization Control of Multiple Vessels with Switching Communication Topologies and Time Delay

Recently, synchronization movement control of multiple vessels has been studied broadly. In most of the studies, the communication network among vessels is considered to be fixed and the time delay is often ignored. However, the communication network among vessels maybe vary because of switching of different tasks, and the time delay is necessary to be considered when the communication network is unreliable. In this paper, the synchronization movement of multiple vessels with switching connected communication topologies is studied, and an adaptive synchronization control algorithm that is based on backstepping sliding mode control is proposed. The control algorithm is achieved by defining cross coupling error which is combination of the trajectory tracking error and velocity tracking error. And an adaptive control term is used to estimate the external disturbances, so that the unknown external disturbances can be compensated. Furthermore, the robustness of the control law to time-varying time delay is also discussed. At last, some simulations are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed synchronization control algorithm.