Bearing-Only Motional Target-Surrounding Control for Multiple Unmanned Surface Vessels

This article proposes a distributed bearing-only controller for multiple unmanned surface vessels (USVs) to encircle and rotate evenly around a motional target with inter-USV topologies. The distributed control law consists of three terms, i.e., a bearing-only estimation term to approximate the target state, an upper-level surrounding term to fulfill the target-surrounding mission, and a single-vessel regulation term to track the upper-level signal. Significantly, technical conditions are derived to guarantee the asymptotical stability of the closed-loop system. Finally, experimental results on a real platform composed of three HUSTER-0.3 USVs and a target vessel are conducted to substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.