Constraint-Based Formation Control for Multiple Surface Aquatic Drones

Aquatic drones operating as Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and equipped with water quality sensors offer a scalable and reliable solution for water quality monitoring. This enables timely detection and informed decision-making for effective water management. These systems exhibit highly complex dynamics and are significantly influenced by hydrodynamic effects and ocean loads. A key challenge to their implementation is the absence of full-state information, often caused by the difficulty or cost of measurement. Similarly, another issue is the lack of continuous measurement due to the discrete nature of sensor sampling and communication constraints, which hinders effective coordination. Therefore, this study directly addresses the previously mentioned limitations by developing a distributed observer-based control framework. A continuous–discrete observer is designed for each drone to estimate the required continuous position and velocity states of both the drone and its neighbors from discrete position measurements. Then, a distributed feedback controller operates in tandem with the observer to achieve effective formation control and tracking. By addressing this coordination challenge, the work advances the practical deployment of autonomous aquatic MAS for improved environmental monitoring and resource management.