Abstract:In order to address the issue of high-precision trajectory tracking control of unmanned surface vehicles with marine environmental disturbances, model uncertainties and thruster saturation, a prescribed-time trajectory tracking control scheme with prescribed performance constraints was proposed. Firstly, a prescribed-time lumped disturbance observer (PTLDO) was designed to accurately reconstruct and compensate the lumped nonlinearities composed of external environmental disturbances and model uncertainties. Secondly, a novel prescribed-time prescribed performance function (PTPPF) was designed to improve the transient and steady-state performance of system. Based on the disturbance observer technology, prescribed performance constraints, prescribed-time stability theory and dynamic surface control technique, a prescribed-time precision tracking control scheme was proposed, which made the trajectory tracking error converge quickly and accurately within the prescribed time and always remain within the prescribed performance constraint boundary. In addition, the rigorous prescribed-time stability analysis of the entire closed-loop control system was carried out and strictly proved by employing the standard Lyapunov stability theory, which further demonstrated that all internal signals of the closed-loop system remain uniformly bounded and the tracking error can converge to a sufficiently small neighborhood of the origin within the prescribed time. Finally, a series of comparative numerical simulation experiments were systematically designed and implemented under different working conditions to comprehensively verify the effectiveness, feasibility and superior control performance of the proposed prescribed-time trajectory tracking control scheme with prescribed performance constraints.