Cooperative Path Following Control of Multiple Underactuated USVs with Experimental Validation

This paper investigates cooperative path-following control for multiple underactuated Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) operating in the presence of disturbances. A distributed coordination framework is developed to assign individual desired paths to each of the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$n$</tex> USVs while preserving the overall formation pattern. Furthermore, we construct a backsteppingbased path-following controller tailored for USVs, which guarantees that tracking errors converge to a small neighborhood and ensures global boundedness of the closed-loop system. A saturation function and disturbance observers are incorporated to improve the controller's resilience to external disturbances. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is demonstrated through both simulation and real-world experiments.