Coordinated control of the heterogeneous unmanned surface vehicle swarm based on the distributed null-space-based behavioral approach

Abstract

Deployment of multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) to execute tasks collaboratively has been acknowledged with greater attention in recent years. On this basis, this paper presents a coordinated control approach for a swarm of multiple heterogeneous unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) based on a distributed null-space-based behavioral (NSB) method. A unified motion model is established first to describe the kinematic characteristics of heterogeneous USVs. According to the differences in the ship types and kinetics of USVs, the swarm is divided into different sub-swarms and an NSB-based coordinated control approach having a distributed structure is proposed combined with behaviors that comply with the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs) to make it more suitable for practical applications. The concept of the virtual leader and the line-of-sight (LOS) guidance law are incorporated into the distributed NSB method, so, in the process of coordinated control, the USV sub-swarms can also be guided to navigate along the given desired path synchronously. Furthermore, a low-cost fusion positioning method is proposed herein to facilitate the implementation of the coordinated control approach in practice. The effectiveness of the proposed coordinated control approach is quantized and verified by simulations and real experiments.