Formation Control of Underactuated Marine Vehicles with Communication Constraints

In this paper, we propose a nonlinear coordination control scheme for formation control of a group of underactuated marine vehicles with communication topology constraints. In particular, we propose decentralized control laws for coordinated path following of marine vehicles with sparse communication networks. The topology of the communication network is captured in the framework of graph theory and the proposed control scheme is applicable to communication networks with both bidirectional and unidirectional communication links.