Distributed guidance-based formation control of marine vehicles under switching topology

Abstract Because of the limited and unreliable communication topology in complex marine environment, the formation control of marine vehicles under switching topology is investigated in this paper, whereas the most previous works for marine formation focused on the fixed communication topology. In order to simplify the formation control design, a novel distributed guidance system, rather than the traditional distributed control system, is established based on leader-follower strategy only using a portion of communication links. To address the problem of input saturation of marine vehicle, the model predictive control is therefore employed to design the marine formation controller; furthermore, the predictive mechanism allows model predictive control to prevent the constraint violation in advance, which brings advantages against the large inertia of ship motion. Both formation tracking control and formation regulation control are studied herein. For application of formation tracking control of marine vehicles, i.e., the time-varying reference signal, the formation control can be realized under switching topology with the condition that the communication topology contains a directed spanning tree. For application of formation regulation control of marine vehicles, i.e., the constant reference signal, the formation control can be realized under switching topology with a relative milder condition that the union of communication topology contains a directed spanning tree. Multiple simulations are included to show the effectiveness of the presented distributed guidance-based MPC formation controllers.