Human-in-the-Loop-Based Secure Prescribed-Time Cooperative Path Following Control for Uncrewed Surface Vehicles

This article presents a human-in-the-loop cooperative control framework for uncrewed surface vessels that executes high-level human commands specifying formation scale and collective speed within a preassignable time. A novel control framework is proposed, integrating a secure encryption-decryption protocol for intervehicle communication with a dynamic event-triggering mechanism to minimize network usage. To address the nonsmooth control signals arising from this setup, a prescribed-time command filter is introduced to avoid explicit differentiation of virtual control signals and to generate smooth implementable reference derivatives. The framework also includes an event-triggered controller to reduce onboard computational resources. Theoretical analysis guarantees boundedness of all closed-loop signals and prescribed-time convergence of the tracking errors under the imposed disturbance and uncertainty conditions, while excluding Zeno behavior. Simulation results validate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed scheme.