Distributed Affine Formation Maneuver for Heterogeneous USV-UAV Systems with Obstacle Avoidance

Heterogeneous unmanned surface vehicle–unmanned aerial vehicle (USV-UAV) systems enable sea–air collaborative missions including marine monitoring, search and rescue, and coastal patrol, with rapidly growing demand in complex ocean environments. Existing formation control methods face critical challenges in unified formation description for heterogeneous dynamics, flexible maneuvering in constrained spaces, obstacle avoidance integration, and dependence on global velocity information. This paper proposes a distributed affine formation maneuver control scheme for heterogeneous USV-UAV systems. A hierarchical control architecture is established with a virtual leader layer for affine trajectory planning and a heterogeneous execution layer for distributed tracking. A stress-matrix-based dynamic affine adjustment mechanism is designed to realize formation maneuvering for obstacle avoidance. A distributed observer is developed to estimate unknown target velocity using only local position measurements. Rigorous theoretical analysis proves the global uniformly ultimately bounded stability of the closed-loop system. Simulation results under multiple complex scenarios verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. In the considered scenarios, the proposed method achieves lower formation-tracking RMSE and a higher obstacle-avoidance success rate than DMPC, CBF, and ETC, but at the cost of a slightly higher per-cycle computation time than CBF and ETC and a slightly higher communication load than the event-triggered baseline. The proposed scheme provides a practical and flexible solution for sea–air heterogeneous collaborative missions in constrained marine environments.