Cascade safe formation control for a fleet of underactuated surface vessels using the DCOP approach

Abstract

This paper considers the formation control of multiple underactuated surface vessel. A distributed cooperative control using the relative information among neighboring vehicles is proposed such that the flock of multiple vehicles forms a desired geometric formation pattern whose center moves along a desired trajectory. In order to guarantee safe flock navigation and interaction of vehicles with the environment, we propose to extend the designed formation tracking controller to more sophisticated algorithm that prevent the vehicles from colliding with environmental obstacles with unknown sizes and locations based on a Decentralized Constrained Optimizing Problem ”DCOP” strategy.