Design of Control Strategy for Swarm Autonomous Vessels for Circling Mission in Calm Water

Control of a group of autonomous surface vessels, called agents, with realistic dynamic for circling mission is addressed with the aid of Lyaponov and graph theory. In this brief, to obtain a cooperative controller in between agents, new coordination transfer are presented and graph theory is used to illustrate communication between the agents. With the aid of Lyaponov theory and graph theory application, decentralized and scalable controllers are designed for group of autonomous vessels to converge to a desired geometry for circling around a specific target point. Due to the realistic agent dynamics, non-holonmic dynamics and turning constrains of the vessels are considered in the design process. Advantage of the proposed controller is: it uses domestic information between agents and the controller is designed based on these information. The agents herein represent a large class of autonomous vessels with realistic limitation on vessel motion. Besides, in previous works inertia and damping matrix of the agents were assumed to be diagonal and constant, in this research work non-diagonal inertia matrix and variable damping matrix are under consideration. MATLAB and Simulink are used to represent the effectiveness of the proposed controllers. As the simulation results show, designed controllers perform well on the system and the objective duty is achieved appropriately.