Distributed guidance law for coordinated maneuvering of networked autonomous surface vehicles

In this paper, a distributed guidance law at the kinematic level is developed for coordinated maneuvering of networked fully-actuated autonomous surface vehicles with a virtual leader that moves along a parameterized path. We design the distributed guidance law based on the constant bearing guidance scheme and a path maneuvering design. We prove that the error signals in the closed-loop guidance system are uniformly globally asymptotically stable and uniformly locally exponentially stable. A salient feature of the proposed guidance law is that the bound of intercepting velocity is known as a priori, which means that the velocity constraints are considered explicitly. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed distributed guidance law for fully-actuated autonomous surface vehicles is verified via simulations.