Tracking Control of Cooperative Marine Vehicles Under Hard and Soft Constraints

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 interagent constraints, i.e., connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance, and soft constraints, specifically on the nonnegativity of the surge velocity, as well as to constant disturbances in the form of unknown ocean currents. The control approach is based on an input-output feedback linearization for marine vehicles and on the edge-based framework for multiagent consensus under constraints. We establish almost-everywhere uniform asymptotic stability of the output dynamics while ensuring that the constraints are respected. High-fidelity simulations are provided to illustrate our results.