Coordinated Adaptive Control for Formation Tracking Surface Vessels with a Time-Invariant Orbital Velocity

This article considers the problem of directing a family of fully-actuated surface vessels to formation tracking a set of closed orbits and approach a time-invariant reference orbital velocity. A consensus-based adaptive control law under the bidirectional commutation topology is proposed to estimate the desired orbital velocity so that the restriction that every vehicle in the family has access to the reference in the literature is removed. The condition of nonzero total linear speed of each vessel is ensured by a potential function. An simulation example is presented as a proof of concept.