LOS Based Containment Maneuvering of Marine Surface Vehicles with Time-Varying Look Ahead Distance

A dual-task coordinated architecture is proposed to address the containment maneuvering problem for marine surface vehicles (MSVs) along a parameterized path, where the spatial information of the path and the path information of the virtual leaders are both known. A line-of-sight (LOS) based guidance task is proposed to achieve the geometric objective of containment maneuvering. The proposed time-varying look ahead distance LOS can improve the effect of path following. Another task is to design bounded containment maneuvering protocols based on smooth saturation functions for the dynamic objective of containment maneuvering. The protocols are capable of producing more faster dynamic behavior to track the path reference speed. Both theory and simulation are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed coordination strategy.