Event-triggered based consensus of autonomous underactuated surface vessels

This paper is concerned with the distributed event-triggered based consensus problem of multiple underactuated surface vessels. The considered vehicles are underactuated where the number of the vehicles actuators is less than the vehicles degrees of freedom. Moreover, information exchange among the vehicles is event-based and vehicles do not need to broadcast their information continuously. Unactuated and actuated states of considered vehicles are strongly coupled, hence a state transformation is utilized to represent the vehide model in a cascade nonlinear system format, and consequently switching controllers are designed to make the vehicles to reach a consensus. Furthermore, agents broadcast their information based on predefined event triggering conditions and the amount of data exchange among the surface vessels is significantly decreased. To illustrate the performance of the proposed approach, simulation results are provided.