Tracking Control of Cooperative Marine Vehicles Under Hard and Soft Constraints

Abstract

We solve the tracking-in-formation problem for a group of underactuated autonomous marine vehicles interconnected over a directed topology. The agents are subject to hard inter-agent constraints, i.e. connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance, and soft constraints, specifically on the non-negativity of the surge velocity, as well as to constant disturbances in the form of unknown ocean currents. The control approach is based on an inputoutput feedback linearization for marine vehicles and on the edge-based framework for multi-agent consensus under constraints. We establish almost-everywhere uniform asymptotic stability of the output dynamics with guaranteed respect of the constraints. High-fidelity simulations are provided to illustrate our results.