Cooperative control design for circular flocking of underactuated hovercrafts

This paper introduces a Lyapunov-based control design for circular flocking with collision avoidance of underactuated hovercrafts. The desired flocking is achieved by means of consensus on a coordinate-dependent transformation of vehicle linear velocity in surge and finiteness of a coordination function. The design makes use of linear velocity in surge and angular velocity in yaw as virtual controls in a backstepping scheme so that the desired flocking algorithm is obtained in a systematic way, and both convergence and collision avoidance are proved with mathematical rigor.