Hierarchical Fuzzy Adaptive Control for Cooperative Pursuit‐Evasion Formation in Marine Surface Vehicles

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates a formation‐based cooperative pursuit‐evasion (PE) problem for marine surface vehicles (MSVs) under local sensing and partially connected communication topologies. A distributed two‐layer control framework is proposed for the case where each pursuer obtains the state information of one assigned evader. At the planning layer, a distributed game‐theoretic mechanism is introduced to generate PE reference trajectories based on local PE errors and prescribed relative configurations. Although each pursuer designs its pursuit strategy according to its assigned evader, all pursuers jointly achieve encirclement of the evader formation through the prescribed relative configurations. At the control layer, a fuzzy adaptive tracking controller is developed to compensate for nonlinear hydrodynamic effects and external disturbances, and to achieve asymptotic convergence of the tracking errors for the generated reference trajectories. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in the considered formation‐based PE scenario.