Reactive Autonomous Ad Hoc Self-Organization of Homogeneous Teams of Unmanned Surface Vehicles for Sweep Coverage of a Passageway with an Obstacle Course

A team of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) travels with a bounded speed in an unknown corridor-like scene containing obstacles. USVs should line up at the right angle with the corridor and evenly spread themselves out to form a densest barrier across the corridor, and this barrier should move along the corridor with a given speed. Collisions between the USVs and the corridor walls, other obstacles, and among themselves must be avoided. In the fractions of the scene containing obstacles, the line formation should be preserved, but the demand for an even distribution is inevitably relaxed. This evenness should be automatically restored after such a fraction is fully traversed. Any USV is aware of the corridor direction and measures the relative coordinates of the objects that lie within a given finite sensing distance. USVs do not know the corridor’s width and the team’s size, cannot distinguish between the team-mates and fill different roles, and do not use communication devices. A computationally cheap control law is presented that attains the posed objectives when being individually run at every USV. The robustness of this law to losses of teammates and admissions of newcomers is justified. Its performance is demonstrated by mathematically rigorous non-local convergence results, computer simulation tests, and experiments with real robots.