Robust consensus of autonomous underactuated surface vessels

A distributed robust consensus of multiple autonomous underactuated surface vessels (AUSV) is studied in the presence of unknown environmental disturbances. The vehicles have 3 degrees of freedom and two actuators. Since the actuated and unactuated states of the vehicles are strongly coupled, first their kinematics and dynamics are transformed to a cascade non-linear system. Then, based on the properties of non-linear cascade systems, a state-based switching controller is proposed which guarantees the robust consensus of AUSVs. To illustrate the performance of the proposed consensus approach, simulation results are provided.