Ship Formation Control: A Guided Leader-Follower Approach

This paper considers the topic of formation control for fully actuated ships. Within a leader-follower framework, a so-called guided formation control scheme is developed by means of a modular design procedure inspired by concepts from integrator backstepping and cascade theory. Control, guidance, and synchronization laws ensure that each individual formation member is able to converge to and maintain its assigned formation position such that the overall formation is able to assemble and maintain itself while traversing an arbitrary, regularly parameterized path that is chosen by a formation control designer. A key novelty of the approach is the derivation of guidance laws that are applicable to o -path traversing of curved paths. The helmsman-like transient motion behavior associated with the scheme is illustrated through a computer simulation involving three fully actuated ships.