Reliability-Enhanced Affine Formation Maneuver Control for Underactuated Unmanned Marine Vehicles Under Random Packet Losses

IThe emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has reshaped the architecture and collaborative capabilities of large-scale unmanned marine vehicles (UMVs). However, potential communication congestion and random packet losses during data transmission pose significant challenges to system reliability. Regarding this, this paper proposes a reliability-enhanced affine formation maneuver control scheme for UMVs. A distributed observer is constructed to generate reference states for each follower, and an underactuated controller is designed to track these states accurately. To cope with limited onboard energy and unreliable data transmission, a novel event-driven communication mechanism (ECM) is integrated into the controller. By introducing an internal auxiliary variable, the minimum communication interval is configured to match hardware constraints, thereby mitigating network congestion. In addition, this design enhances the robustness of the ECM against random packet losses, further improving communication reliability. The efficacy of the proposed approach is validated through rigorous theoretical analysis and comprehensive simulations.