Formation Control and Obstacle Avoidance Design for Networked USV Swarm With Exogenous Disturbance Under Intermittent Communication

This study addresses the formation control problem of under-actuated unmanned surface vehicle (USV) swarm systems and designs an obstacle avoidance strategy for navigating in obstacle environments. The intermittent communication scheme, consisting of the working period and the rest period, is introduced to reduce the communication burden and the consumption of control resources. A distributed formation control strategy is designed to guarantee the realization of the desired formation configuration. Considering the potential impact of obstacles in the operating environment, the artificial potential field repulsion obstacle avoidance method is embedded into the formation control strategy. To eliminate the impact of exogenous disturbances, a disturbance observer is established using the partially known disturbance information. Sufficient conditions are provided to ensure the uniformly ultimate boundedness of the formation error and disturbance observation error. In addition, an energy function related to the obstacle position information is designed to verify that the desired obstacle avoidance behavior can be achieved. The feasibility of theoretical analysis is validated by applying the developed control strategy to surface formation cruise missions.