Fixed-time Formation of AUVs with Disturbance via Event-triggered Control

This work focuses on the fixed-time event-triggered formation control problem for multi-AUV systems with external uncertainties, which can significantly reduce energy consumption and the frequency of the controller updates. At the same time, the convergence speed of the system is improved. To tackle with the problem of explosion of differentiation terms in backstepping method, a command filter is introduced to represent the derivative of virtual variables. Moreover, the distributed control strategy is considered and the lumped uncertainties are tackled with the super-twisting sliding mode method. It is proved that under the proposed event-triggered control strategies the Zeno behavior is avoided. Further, fixed-time formation control method can be finished within a fixed settling time with arbitrary initial states of the multi-AUV. Finally, simulation is presented to show the effectiveness and validity of the fixed-time event-triggered formation protocols for the multi-AUV systems.