Multi-USV cooperative oil spill source seeking via extremum seeking combined with information fusion

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of cooperative source seeking for oil spill pollution by multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), where the oil spill plume propagation is modeled by a linear advection–diffusion equation in two-dimensional space. The main objective is to construct a cooperative source seeking scheme for a group of USVs in the framework of extremum seeking combined with information fusion to solve such cooperative source seeking problem. To do this, both a gradient-based control law and a formation control law are included in the cooperative source seeking scheme. The gradient-based control law that is constructed by extremum-seeking control combined with information fusion drives the multiple USVs to approach the oil spill source, where the gradient is estimated online via the extremum-seeking control and the fused concentration value that is derived via a linear H∞ filter from the local concentration measurements at the USV’s current position. In the source seeking process, the USVs driven by the formation control law based on the virtual structure method maintain a preset circular formation. The convergence performance of the cooperative source seeking scheme is analyzed rigorously by the Lyapunov method. Finally, extensive numerical simulations are included to validate the theoretical algorithm.