Distributed consensus control for a group of autonomous marine vehicles with nonlinearity and external disturbances.

This paper is concerned with the distributed consensus control for a group of autonomous marine vehicles with nonlinearity and external disturbances via sampled-data communications. First, the kinematical equation of autonomous marine vehicle is established. Second, stability criteria is derived to ensure the stability of autonomous marine vehicles by combining Lyapunov function method and free-weighting matrix approach. Third, a distributed sampled-data control strategy is proposed to achieve the consensus of autonomous marine vehicles by designing suitable control parameters. Numerical simulations are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed consensus control approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]