In this article, the coordinated path-following control problem for networked unmanned surface vehicles is investigated. The communication network brings time delays and packet dropouts to the fleet, which will have negative effects on the control performance of the fleet. To attenuate the negative effects, a novel networked predictive control scheme is proposed. By introducing the predictive error into the control scheme, the proposed control strategy admits some advantages compared with existing networked predictive control strategies, for example, a degree of robustness to disturbances, lower requirements for the computing capacity of the onboard processors, high flexibility in controller design, and so on. Conditions that guarantee the control performance of the overall system are derived in the theoretical analysis. At last, experiments on hovercraft test beds are implemented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

中文翻译：

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联网无人水面车辆的协调路径跟随控制

本文研究了联网无人水面车辆的协调路径跟随控制问题。通信网络给车队带来时间延迟和丢包，这将对车队的控制性能产生负面影响。为了减轻负面影响，提出了一种新的网络预测控制方案。通过在控制方案中引入预测误差，所提出的控制策略与现有的网络化预测控制策略相比具有一些优势，例如，对干扰的鲁棒性程度，对板载处理器计算能力的要求较低，控制器的高度灵活性设计等等。在理论分析中推导出保证整个系统控制性能的条件。最后，