With the rapid development of information technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics, unmanned autonomous systems have demonstrated tremendous application potential in fields such as military, aerospace, marine exploration, disaster rescue, and intelligent transportation. Distributed cooperative control, as a key technology for achieving efficient and flexible collaboration among multiple unmanned autonomous systems, has become a research focus. A review is conducted on the research progress in distributed cooperative control of unmanned autonomous systems. Firstly, it discusses the core theories in the aspects of consensus problems, formation control, and distributed optimization. Then, combining the practical applications of current multiple unmanned autonomous systems, it presents the latest research achievements in unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles, unmanned surface vessels, unmanned underwater vehicles, and multi-modal cooperative control. Finally, it explores the future challenges and development in this field.

An optimal tracking control problem for a class of nonlinear systems with guaranteed performance and asymmetric input constraints is discussed in this paper. The control policy is implemented by adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm under two event-based triggering mechanisms. It is often challenging to design an optimal control law due to the system deviation caused by asymmetric input constraints. First, a prescribed performance control technique is employed to guarantee the tracking errors within predetermined boundaries. Subsequently, considering the asymmetric input constraints, a discounted non-quadratic cost function is introduced. Moreover, in order to reduce controller updates, an event-triggered control law is developed for ADP algorithm. After that, to further simplify the complexity of controller design, this work is extended to a self-triggered case for relaxing the need for continuous signal monitoring by hardware devices. By employing the Lyapunov method, the uniform ultimate boundedness of all signals is proved to be guaranteed. Finally, a simulation example on a mass–spring–damper system subject to asymmetric input constraints is provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.