Bounded Containment Maneuvering Protocols for Marine Surface Vehicles With Quantized Communications and Tracking Errors Constrained Guidance: Theory and Experiment.

A new type of containment maneuvering protocols for multiple marine surface vehicles (MSVs) is developed to follow a parameterized path in this work, where the tracking errors are constrained within finite time and the information needed to be transmitted is quantized during coordination. To achieve containment maneuvering of multiple MSVs, a two-objective coordinated control framework is proposed. For the geometric objective, by developing tan-type barrier Lyapunov functions (BLFs) and extended Lyapunov condition-based finite-time guidance laws, the performance of the parameterized line-of-sight guidance framework, including convergence speed and tracking error constraints, is improved. For the dynamic objective, based on quantized control strategy and smooth saturation functions, novel bounded containment maneuvering protocols are proposed to dramatically alleviate the burden of communications among MSVs and ensure more faster dynamic behavior on tracking the path updating speed. Both theoretical analysis and experimental tests with comparative studies illustrate the validity of the proposed containment maneuvering strategy.