Event-driven prescribed performance distributed formation control for MSVs based on second-order step response with actuator input saturation

This study aims to investigate the problem of event-driven distributed formation control for marine surface vehicles (MSVs) system, including prescribed performance constraint and actuator input saturation. By constructing a novel prescribed performance function based on second-order step response, the intuitive physical significance is realized, and the performance specifications imposed on the output tracking errors are achieved. Subsequently, a double-layer adaptive sliding-mode disturbance observer (ASMDO) is presented to compensate for lumped uncertain terms. Within the controller design stage, an auxiliary dynamic system is built to introduce the auxiliary intermediate control law, thus avoiding the need to directly design anti-saturation generalized control input for the MSVs system. Then, by incorporating external dynamic variable, a dynamic event-triggered mechanism (DETM) is proposed to regulate the transmission between the controller and actuators. Under the DETM, the designed controller only transmits the control force and torque into actuators at the specified triggering moment, and the trigger moment is independent of the internal state of the system. After that, the minimum inter-event time (MIET) of the proposed DETM is proved to be strictly positive, which ensures Zeno-free behavior. Lastly, the efficiency and advantages of the proposed event-driven distributed formation controller are verified through numerical simulations.