Distributed containment control for multiple ocean bottom flying nodes with velocity error constraint and input saturation

This paper uses the directed communication topology to investigate the finite-time error constraint containment control for multiple Ocean Bottom Flying Node (OBFN) systems with thruster faults. The OBFN is a benthic Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), which has been used to explore submarine resources. The model uncertainties, velocity error constraint, external disturbances, and thruster faults of OBFNs motivate the design of containment controller. Moreover, some followers could obtain the states of leader OBFNs. We designed the command filter and the input signal is a hyperbolic tangent function. The virtual velocity error command is generated to follow the velocity error. Then the novel velocity error constraint distributed control algorithm is developed. Furthermore, for the problem of input saturation, by designing a stable anti-saturation compensator, an improved containment algorithm is proposed. It is proved that both the proposed approaches can converge the containment errors towards zero through Lyapunov theory in finite time, which means the followers can reach the convex hull formed by leaders in finite time. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the two strategies.