Formation control of multiple marine vehicles based passivity-control design

This paper addresses the problem of coordination path following control of multiple autonomous vehicles. Stated briefly, the problem consists in steering a group of vehicles along a specified paths, while holding a desired inter-ship formation pattern. Path-following for each vehicle amounts to reducing an appropriately defined geometric error to zero. We first show a passivity property for the path following system and, next, combine this with a passivity-based synchronization algorithm developed in [2] to coordinate the vehicles along their paths. Vehicle coordination is achieved by adjusting the speed of each vehicle along its path according to information exchanged on the positions of a subset of the other vehicles, as determined by the communication topology adopted. Global stability and convergence of the closed-loop system are guaranteed.