Cooperative formation control of underactuated marine vehicles for target surveillance under sensing and communication constraints

This paper presents a Leader-Follower formation control strategy for underactuated marine vehicles which move under sensing and communication constraints in the presence of bounded persistent environmental disturbances. We assume that the vehicles do not communicate for exchanging information regarding on their states (pose and velocities), and that their sensing capabilities are restricted, due to limited range and angle-of-view. Sensing constraints are thus realized as a set of inequality state constraints which should never be violated (viability constraints). The viability constraints define a closed subset K of the configuration space (viability set K). The control objective is thus reduced into to coordinating the motion of the vehicles in a Leader-Follower formation, while system trajectories starting in K always remain viable in K. The proposed control design employs dipolar vector fields and a viability-based switching control scheme, which guarantees that system viability is always maintained. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm, as well as its relevance with surveillance of (stationary) targets are demonstrated through simulations.