A Novel Adaptive Leader-Follower Formation Control Strategy for Underactuated Surface Vehicles

摘要

The cooperative control of multiple marine surface vehicles has been receiving considerable attention over the past few years. The main challenge is to design stabilizing controllers to make a group of surface vehicles track predefined paths within a desired formation. In the literature, the problem is addressed through three approaches, namely behavior-based method, virtual structure method, and leader-follower method. This paper presents a novel leader-follower formation control strategy for underactuated surface vehicles. A numerical simulator is developed based on Robot operating system (ROS). The formation control method is designed based on line-of sight (LOS) guidance law. The constant parameter in the design of the look-ahead distance is replaced by a dynamic parameter, which ensures quick convergence speed of the follower vehicles to the desired position. Then an adaptive LOS bearing angle is proposed to effectively reduce and eliminate the chattering near the equilibrium point. Meanwhile the approach angle is designed considering time delay of the control system and the curvature of the leader’s path. The method can be applied to both straight-line and curved-line paths. The tracking errors of the closed-loop system are used to design the formation controller through feedback linearizing, and the system is proved to be uniformly globally exponentially stable based on Lyapunov stability theory. Simulation and comparison results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.