Formation control for underactuated unmanned surface vehicles based on consistency theory and leader-follower mode

Abstract

The formation involving multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) is a new hotspot in research on USVs. Considering the formation control problem of underactuated USVs, a distributed formation control algorithm is proposed based on consistency theory and leader-follower mode. The motion processes of the reference USV with respect to each USV are obtained with a consistency algorithm. By adjusting the control input, each USV converges to the reference vehicle. Thus, the expected formation of all USVs can be guaranteed if the trajectories of these two types of USVs coincide. The entire formation uses distributed control, which has certain tolerance to special situations, such as communication delay and communication interruption. The effectiveness of the control strategy is verified through simulations.