Robust Adaptive Neural Cooperative Control for the USV-UAV Based on the LVS-LVA Guidance Principle

Around the cooperative path-following control for the underactuated surface vessel (USV) and the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a logic virtual ship-logic virtual aircraft (LVS-LVA) guidance principle is developed to generate the reference heading signals for the USV-UAV system by using the “virtual ship” and the “virtual aircraft”, which is critical to establish an effective correlation between the USV and the UAV. Taking the steerable variables (the main engine speed and the rudder angle of the USV, and the rotor angular velocities of the UAV) as the control input, a robust adaptive neural cooperative control algorithm was designed by employing the dynamic surface control (DSC), radial basic function neural networks (RBF-NNs) and the event-triggered technique. In the proposed algorithm, the reference roll angle and pitch angle for the UAV can be calculated from the position control loop by virtue of the nonlinear decouple technique. In addition, the system uncertainties were approximated through the RBF-NNs and the transmission burden from the controller to the actuators was reduced for merits of the event-triggered technique. Thus, the derived control law is superior in terms of the concise form, low transmission burden and robustness. Furthermore, the tracking errors of the USV-UAV cooperative control system can converge to a small compact set through adjusting the designed control parameters appropriately, and it can be also guaranteed that all the signals are the semi-global uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB). Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm has been verified via numerical simulations in the presence of the time-varying disturbances.