Research on Formation Switching and Reconfiguration Control Method of Unmanned Surface Vehicle Formation Escort Task

The escort task is of great significance for the safe navigation of merchant ships. Compared with the conventional fleet, the use of unmanned surface vehicle formation to perform escort tasks can greatly save the escort cost and reduce casualties. This paper takes the formation of unmanned surface vehicle formation for escort task as the research object. Aiming at the problem that the formation needs to switch and restructure frequently according to different situations in the task, Null Space Based method is used to introduce event trigger mechanism, and the control strategies of formation switch and reconfiguration are designed respectively, which solves the problems of premature time, slow speed, lengthy process of formation switch and reconfiguration, and better completes the escort task. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the flexibility and robustness of unmanned surface vehicle escort formation.