Abstract
This paper presents a formation control strategy for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) with sensing constraints moving in a leader-follower formation. Each USV is assumed to be equipped with a vision-based sensor, which is able to get the line-of-sight (LOS) range and bearing information. Most existing literature assumes that the USVs in formation control are with no sensing limitations or with 360-degree sensing fields; however, in our research, the vision-based sensor’s capability is restricted due to limited Field of View (FOV) and visual range. We consider that each USV in formation problem is equipped with a sector-like sensing field sensor for the leader-follower formation in two-dimensional space. The formation controller is developed by employing backstepping control technique and exponential remapping. The backstepping controller is designed to stabilize the triangular formation of three USVs, and the proposed exponential remapping method is to deal with the sector-like sensing constraint problem. Comparative analysis with three exponential remapping methods using numerical simulations is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Highlights
Over the past few years, due to the increasing need for utilizing multiple vehicles to perform difficult tasks as a team, the formation control of multivehicle systems has gained enormous interests in the research of system and control
This paper presents a formation control strategy for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) with sensing constraints moving in a leaderfollower formation
Other parameters of Position Errors Remapping (PER) and Heading Angle Error Remapping (HAER) are chosen according to Section 3.3
Summary
Over the past few years, due to the increasing need for utilizing multiple vehicles to perform difficult tasks as a team, the formation control of multivehicle systems has gained enormous interests in the research of system and control. Maintaining a desired formation enables multiple vehicles to cooperate with each other to accomplish some difficult tasks which are not executable by a single one. It can reduce system cost, enhance work efficiency, and provide redundancy against individual failures [1]. The formation control has been focused on the marine vehicles, and most works appear to have been done within the leader-follower framework. In [15], within a leader-follower framework, fully actuated ships were controlled as a formation by applying the integrator backstepping and cascade theory. In [16], the problem of path following and formation control for underactuated surface vessels in the presence of unknown ocean currents was considered, and the proposed controllers were based on line-of-sight (LOS) guidance, adaptive control, and cascaded systems
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