Image-Based Formation Control of Unmanned Surface Vehicles With Field-of-View Constraints

This paper presents an image-based control of a group of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) to achieve leader-follower formation. Each follower in the USV group equipped with a monocular camera is driven to guarantee that the image coordinate of the leader’s feature point converge to the reference image point in the image space. The monocular camera is limited field of view, which relates to the issue of visibility maintenance. A velocity observer is employed to estimate the surge and sway velocities of the leader. Using barrier Lyapunov synthesis, image-based leader-follower formation controllers are designed such that the image coordinate errors converge to a small neighborhood while guaranteeing prescribed transient and steady-state performance. The designed formation controllers depend only on the image information acquired by onboard camera without relative position measurements and an explicit communication. Simulation results show the efficacy of the proposed image-based leader-follower formation controllers.