Motion control and collision avoidance algorithms for unmanned surface vehicle swarm in practical maritime environment

The issue of controlling a swarm of autonomous unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) in a practical maritime environment is studied in this paper. A hierarchical control framework associated with control algorithms for the USV swarm is proposed. In order to implement the distributed control of the autonomous swarm, the control framework is divided into three task layers. The first layer is the tele-operated task layer, which delivers the human operator’s command to the remote USV swarm. The second layer deals with autonomous tasks (i.e. swarm dispersion, or avoidance of obstacles and/or inner-USV collisions), which are defined by specific mathematical functions. The third layer is the control allocation layer, in which the control inputs are designed by applying the sliding mode control method. The motion controller is proved asymptotically stable by using the Lyapunov method. Numerical simulation of USV swarm motion is used to verify the effectiveness of the control framework.