Formation Path Following of Multiple Underactuated Surface Vehicles in Presence of Unknown Environmental Forces

In this paper, we propose a cooperative guidance law for straight-line formation path-following of multiple USVs in the presence of ocean currents. In the proposed approach, the desired USV paths are synchronized using the distributed observer, while the KF-based LOS guidance laws and nonlinear velocity laws are used to minimize the path-following errors and compensate for the sideslip. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by numerical simulations.