This paper focuses on the fixed-time leader–follower formation control of multiple underwater vehicles (MUVs) in the presence of external disturbances. First, an adaptive fixed-time disturbance observer (AFxDO) is developed to deal with unknown time-varying environmental disturbances. The developed AFxDO guarantees the fixed-time convergence property of the disturbance observation error and no prior information on the external disturbances or their derivatives is required. Then, with the aid of the developed AFxDO, a distributed event-triggered fixed-time backstepping controller was developed to achieve the leader–follower formation tracking control of MUVs. To solve the “explosion of complexity” problem inherent in the conventional backstepping, a nonlinear filter is introduced to obtain the derivative of the virtual control law. Furthermore, to reduce the communication burden, the event-triggered mechanism is integrated into the formation tracking controller. The stability analysis shows that the closed-loop MUV system is practical fixed-time stable. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

This paper investigates the problem of real-time parameter identification for ship maneuvering parameters and wave peak frequency in an ocean environment. Based on the idea of Euler discretion, a combined model of ship maneuvering and wave peak frequency (ship–wave) is made a discretion, and a discrete-time auto-regressive moving-average model with exogenous input (ARMAX) is derived for parameter identification. Based on the ideas of stochastic gradient identification and multi-innovation theory, a multi-innovation stochastic gradient (MI-SG) algorithm is derived for parameter identification of the ship–wave discretion model. Maximum likelihood theory is introduced to propose a maximum likelihood-based multi-innovation stochastic gradient (ML-MI-SG) algorithm. Compared to the MI-SG algorithm, the ML-MI-SG algorithm shows improvements in both parameter identification accuracy and identification convergence speed. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.