Distributed Formation Maneuvering Quantized Control of Under-Actuated Unmanned Surface Vehicles with Collision and Velocity Constraints

This paper focuses on a distributed cooperative time-varying formation maneuvering issue of under-actuated unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). A fleet of USVs is guided by a parameterized path with a time-varying formation while avoiding collisions and preserving the connectivity in the environment with multiple obstacles. In some surface missions, due to the obstacles in the external environment, the bandwidth limitations of the communication channel, and the hardware components/performance constraints of the USVs themselves, each vehicle is considered to be subject to model uncertainty, actuator quantization, sensor dead zone, and velocity constraints. During the control design process, the radial basis function (RBF) neural networks (NNs) are utilized to deal with nonlinear terms. Based on a nonlinear decomposition method, the relationship between the control signal and the quantization one is established, which overcomes the difficulty arising from actuator quantization. A Nussbaum function is introduced to handle the unknown output dead zone problem caused by reduced sensor sensitivity. Moreover, a universal-constrained function is employed to satisfy both the constrained and unconstrained requirements during formation keeping and obstacle avoidance. The Lyapunov stability theory confirmed that the error signals are uniformly ultimately bounded (UUB). The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed formation control of multiple USVs.