Formation Control for Water-Jet USV Based on Bio-Inspired Method

The formation control problem for underactuated unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) is addressed by a distributed strategy based on virtual leader strategy. The control system takes account of disturbance induced by external environment. With the coordinate transformation, the advantage of the proposed scheme is that the control point can be any point of the ship instead of the center of gravity. By introducing bio-inspired model, the formation control problem is addressed with backstepping method. This avoids complicated computation, simplifies the control law, and smoothes the input signals. The system uniform ultimate boundness is proven by Lyapunov stability theory with Young inequality. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness and robust of the proposed controller.